Last weekend in Sri Lanka was beautiful, and I intend to come back, yet certainly not on the national’s carrier SriLankan Airlines. And I dare to say, flying more than 200,000 miles a year on various airlines that SriLankan Airlines is the worst, least reliable and most unprofessional I have ever come across. One might tend to be apologetic and say, well, it’s a developing country, so what do you expect. But it’s not that simple: SriLankan Airlines has a proclaimed widespread international network, Colombo being its hub and hence competing with other hubs in the region like Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. Therefore, SriLankan Airlines intends to play in the Premier League, hence it must be judged by the rules of the Premier League.
What happened? I flew from Bangalore to Colombo on Friday and had a confirmed return flight on Sunday late afternoon. Arriving in time at the airport, I wondered that there was a queue of people at only one counter and hardly anything was moving on and no communication on whatsoever. Finally, the crowd gathered in a cloud in front of the counter and wanted to know what’s up. The alleged supervisor of the airline ground crew floundered something like “flight by 20 percent overbooked, 22 more people than seats, we have only very few seats left.”
Let’s briefly discuss the metrics of airline capacity booking which is a hell of complex thing. Airlines overbook by default because the experience has demonstrated that many passengers don’t show up. Fair enough, you don’t want to fly with empty seats on a regular basis. On the other hand, as an airline you are riding a thin line in the probabilistic space in case that basically everybody who booked actually shows up. Professional airlines like Lufthansa have a very transparent method of handling that situation: Passengers are asked openly who would like to stay back, get a nice compensation (a few hundred Euro) and a good hotel. Usually, the situation can be cleared to everybody’s satisfaction.
SriLankan Airlines, however, has a totally different approach to it. In the first place and in our concrete case, the plane from Colombo to Bangalore was almost fully booked with incoming transit passengers from other destinations who would change to their connecting flight to Bangalore. You remember: Premier League player, big balls and stuff, international airline and cool. So the “probabilistic space” of possible no-shows did not apply because they knew that these people would be in for sure to Bangalore, because they were already in other planes on their way in to Colombo. So, question number one: Why did Sri Lankan Air not take the effort to call the passengers who were booked for only the leg Colombo-Bangalore and ask them if they were willing to stay a day more. I would have answered: “Sure, fine, so one more day on the beach.” No, no, but what they do: They let their paying cattle gather in front of the check-in counter and make idiots out of them.
Transparency of the process? Forget about that. It was obvious that people who were somehow personally connected in the airline got preferential treatment and got on board. And there was at no point a straight-forward word from the alleged “supervisor” who was staring in her screen and rocking for alibi-action into her keyboard in order to avoid confrontational discussions. When it became clear that quite a lot had to stay on ground, of which many from Colombo simply went back home, there were seven of us who were told that we would get a hotel for the night and a “compensation”. For that we would just have to fill a “voucher” where it turned out that we would get 40 US-Dollars which can be used to purchase SriLankan Airline-tickets. The “voucher”, however, turned out to be in the first place a waiver for all claims against the airline for any damages or indemnifications suffered from the non-transportation. This really hit the roof. As chance wants it, among the seven four of us were quite smart businessmen and we started to protest to sign-off our souls in that way for 40 f*** Dollars.
For the average Sri Lankan, 40 Dollars might be a lot of money, but for someone in business from the west that’s ridiculous given the hassle plus loss of earnings for a day. So out of principle, us four refused to sign this paper. Instead we called for the senior supervisor who should have been there anyway to handle the situation from the beginng. And this guy, by the name of D.J. Ahmat (Senior Airport Services Supervisor) behaved like the biggest sissy, coward and girlie-man I have ever come across. When we started to give him some “tough love” about the nature of his airline, the insufficient compensation, the unprofessional communication and asked him where we can sue the company, he was almost in tears saying: “My hands are tied at the moment, these are the rules the company has set up”, hiding in organization inertia and displaying utmost level of irresponsibility for his customers. Like everybody does at Sri Lankan Air, by the way, as I’ll come to explain later. However, he promised that all of us would get a nice hotel and for all of us the tickets would be ready at a quick check-in counter the next day and our seats would be confirmed-confirmed to finally reach Bangalore.
Hotel Tamarind Tree was ok, no complains about that, but using the lost time somehow productively, I started to do the maths. The “voucher” of $40 plus hotel and food altogether might cost the airline $80. Which is a great bet, because the bank (=the airline) always wins. Think about that for a moment. Instead of keeping somehow to your real capacity, you always overbook by a huge margin so that you are always full, especially with transit passenger from abroad who are paying flight rates on western price-levels. The deterrent for the airline on the flipside given $80 per rejected passenger is negligible. The clue: This only works well as long as you are in a banana republic like Sri Lanka where you as an airline know that a “voucher” of $40 will be considered adequate by local measures and there is no way that in front of an abysmal jurisdictional system you will be forced to pay a higher indemnification. Hence, you just deep-dive into collective ignorance and overbook, overbook, overbook. (The manager of the hotel Tamarind Tree actually confirmed that SriLankan Airlines sends a lot of people like this to his place on a daily basis.) So as Sri Lankan Air you simply give a shit about the people you leave on the ground for the sake of your profit maximization. Even myself as an entrepreneur, I have to admit: Karl Marx with was painfully right describing the only real intention of “the capitalist”.
But unfortunately, the story doesn’t end here. The next day, the cattle were brought back to the airport and went straight to the promised quick-check in. And indeed, the tickets for the flight were prepared. Surprisingly, however, only for those three who has signed the “voucher” (=waiver). And the lady started to ask us other four: “Have you actually signed this voucher yesterday? Otherwise I can’t give you the ticket.” This really made the glass overflow: There was shouting, yes, and there were f*** words, too, and the immediate request to speak to the highest available service manager for immediate action and handing us out the “f*** boarding passes”. Given the front of collective well deserved aggression and after a few panicked phone conversations, the woman gave in and gave us what we had actually paid for already for one day before. Conclusion: SriLankan Airlines not just denies you what you have purchased, i.e. a confirmed flight on a given day, but attempts to blackmail you in case you don’t buy into their lame deal. That’s really the pinnacle of everything I have ever experienced in the service industry.
Especially, the above mentioned D.J. Ahmat (I don’t actually think that as a “D.J.” he’s responsible for the music in a club; they just take cool people for that) should really have made sure after the scene on the airport the day before that all the tickets according to his promise for the next day would be ready. But not, as he’s a sissy, coward and girlie-man, and his “hands are tied” he just lets it fall one more time into the gap of a big organization thinking: “Well, my shift tonight is over, let the morning shift handle it.”
We are almost through. What I find important to emphasize is that my harshest criticism is not directed towards the mere overbooking. That per se can happen. It’s about exploiting the particular underlying economics by SriLankan Airlines to drive this habit to the absolute extreme. Moreover, when you are affected as a passenger: to make a bad situation even worse by incompetent, unprofessional and irresponsible staff. The extent to which these people hide behind responsibility and refuse taking ownership of a problem, can well be called “systemic organizational failure on a large scale”. It is obvious that I will never ever use this airline again, but expressing this with a supreme attitude would just make me fall prey to ridicule. So the reason why I took the time to write about it in detail and put it up my blog publicly is my belief that such a situation can only change if the reputation of Sri Lankan Air gets systemically tarnished by just truthfully telling how they behave. And then let the word spread so that educated consumers make their available choices. If that pain in terms of lost revenues becomes too strong, then, and only then such an aloof apparatus will begin to change direction.
I have forwarded that text to the “customer service” of SriLankan Airlines as well as to their CEO Peter Hill (peter.hill@srilanka.aero). In case there is any response, I will keep you posted here.
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