Ridiculous charges

Caution : some serious ranting to be found in this post.

I have some airmiles for TAP, the Portuguese airline. I got these when I was working in Brazil and Portugal some time ago. These miles expire after 3 years, which is reasonable. So I booked a flight to Athens from London to use these. TAP doesn’t fly this route directly or through Portugal, so you have to use one of their partner airlines, which is Lufthansa in this case.

So the flight is free. However, the charges were a ridiculous 190 euros. Here’s what TAP had to say :

We inform that all taxes (airport, fuel, security or others) as well as any credit card fees will be supported by the Victoria Member. At your booking you have 6 taxes: 3 airport taxes, 1 to security, other to fuel and one for your services. Your service taxes is always 25.00 € the other taxes valour are according to economic rules. They are applying to all quid of booking.

I also had to call a 0870 number. These numbers are the biggest ripoffs in the UK at the moment : you have to pay to contact a company. The excuses companies give for this is that they don’t make money on it, it is only used to pay for the service and so on.

Service is dead, in other words. This, according to me, is due to the fact that the bottom line is the only thing that matters to company these days. That is fair, they have a duty to their shareholders. However, companies should not be allowed to claim anymore that they ‘give great service’ and that ‘we are important to them’ and crap like that. Those days are over.

Perhaps the only exception to this is when service is included in the criteria for the CEO’s bonus. I don’t think a lot of companies have that now. Without something like this, good service will never be a priority for management.