alt Hacker NewsI ran into this recently with ANA (All Nippon Airways). [1] There’s no better way to kill customer loyalty than to put someone on hold for 45 minutes on a charged phone call to make a basic change to a reservation that should be possible on the website (they also refuse to handle reservation-specific inquiries over email).
Just had a look and JAL (Japan Airlines) also doesn’t offer a FreeCall number. I haven’t had reason to call them yet though, so not sure if hold times are as bad as ANA. ANA recently redid their website and it’s a flaming pile of garbage (I could go on another whole rant here about all the ways it’s broken), which I suspect may be increasing call volumes for the past year or so.
[1] https://www.ana.co.jp/en/jp/guide/contact/international/inte...
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This is bizarre! When you call ANA from Australia they have multiple dedicated 1800 (free) numbers you can reach them at, including a call centre in the Philippines for simple issues that picked up straight away for me. I wonder why they're so much more customer hostile in their own geography?
I try to fly with Skymark when I can because their website is gloriously basic in the best way possible, it's like barebones server-rendered HTML. And you can book your ticket without payment being in the critical flow. You get like 24 hours to pay and that removes SO much stress from booking airline tickets. I hope they never change or "modernize" it with some shitty JS framework.