Why friends don't let frieds fly Blue1

I'm in Finland, but just had a very Kingfishery (an Indian airline teetering on the brink of bankcruptcy) no-fly experience with a local airline, Blue1. I arrived to the airport early, e-checked myself in, went through the security check and camped beside the gate 14A to fly to Oulu. The scheduled boarding time came and went, but I was much more alarmed when suddenly the gate label was changed from Oulu to Brussels.

I went to have a look at the departures board and saw that my flight was cancelled. Sure the weather was not perfect, but mine was the only red blinking island in a vast sea of green.

There are other airlines flying to Oulu every morning and my cancelled flight was the first one to go, so I went to the transfer desk to get a seat on either of those. Not much luck there, as you can see.

I went to ask the SAS/Blue1 lounge if there was anyone who could help me and they kindly told me I need to exit the airport area and go back to the Blue1 ticket office only to find that I was hardly the only person with the same problem.

The flights I could've taken took off well before the queue even inched forward for the first time. Blue1 took great care to make sure every person on their cancelled flight missed every one of those - of course this way they save money as their worst case scenario turns into a re-schedule to a later flight of theirs or full refund - a ticket on any of those competitor flights is undoubtedly the dearest option. They'll refund the flight tickets, but the lost time, groupwork and 90€ of cab money are mine and my employer's losses. I'm not holding my breath to hear back from them, but I've posted a link to this post to their feedback form in case they'd like to comment or compensate.

Companies nowadays try very hard to define an identity. Here's an excerpt of Blue1's lofty corporate goals, which financial realities seem to have thrown out the window:

Blue1's more than 400 employees are actively and daily involved in thousands of passengers’ everyday life. With Blue1 a new era of air travel is created of the courage and passion to our own work and importance in our customer-focused perspective.

I must say I'm pretty pissed off about the airline now - it's one thing to cancel a flight and at least make an effort to take of the affected passengers and another to cancel a flight and make absolutely sure no customer gets any help to keep their commitments.

Consumer complaint power and the Internet, or "Don't get mad, get even... and then some"

So it's probably obvious by now that I'm a little more than slightly pissed off at DishTV for delivering me a service some 3 weeks later than promised and then cutting me off from it less than 1 hour after finally getting it. Oh, yes, and for constantly promising to fix it without actually doing so. That too.

I can complain all I want to the care personnel, but those people are just earning a pittance listening to people yelling at them so I'm not too hard on them - I can't help but laugh when they again promise me what their workflow system tells them to promise - I'd bet knowing full well that the problem will still be there tomorrow.

Blogs like this are actually suprisingly effective for getting back at companies who treat their customers like crap. Consider this post of mine from 2008. Google Analytics tells me that 908 separate people have viewed the rant 1059 times since I posted it. If I managed to convince even 50% of those people to buy something else the companies I complained about lost over 25k€ / $35k in sales, some 150 times more than I lost buying their crappy products. And counting. People find the post through google searches and it still gets a steady 30-50 pageviews per month - I've cut my losses a long time ago, but they aren't done with theirs.

Cricket looks fantastic on DishTV TruHD - NOT...

So I have this problem with our bricked DishTV set-top-box. DishTV customer care has a standard promise of 24-hour service restoration, but it's based on, well, apparently nothing more than a hope and prayer. The care center personnel do a pretty good imitation of being surprised that no technician has showed up with a laptop to revive the bricked device, but I have a hard time believing I am the only one with this experience.

The funny part is, today is the quarter final match of the cricket world cup with India playing Australia. I had actually thought that I might watch this as the DishTV installation came with the cricket WC package included. I've never watched a game and thought this would be a good opportunity to start and maybe understand the rules even. For me the fact that I'll miss this is not really a biggie, but imagine if I was Indian and could not watch the big game in my spanking new HD super duper package? I'd be suicidal.

Well they told me, again, that with 100% certainty a technician will come within 24 hours. I'm not holding my breath...

Why not to become a DishTV subscriber in India

Many Indian companies feel that no punishment is severe enough for people who dare become their customers. Satellite firm DishTV seems to be one of these. After 3 weeks of patiently trying get the darn thing installed it finally came today in the form of and old guy and his rusty scooter. The joy of joys getting HD service again was short lived - after about an hour of use DishTV proceeded to brick our new HD set-top-box with an OTA firmware push.

They tell me that a technician will come in 24 hours but that's what they said about the installation too (which took 3+ weeks and required an interpreter because the technician was illiterate and spoke no English).

I think it's a very good thing that the Indian government restricts foreign companies from coming here to do business because most of the successful local firms wouldn't survive a day in open competition.