A woman shared a complain post on Facebook sharing what her sister had to go through with SQ.
Here is the story:
I would like to share my experience with SQ.
While I’m not a Krisflyer member, SQ reputation precedes before it.
My 60 year old sister booked a round trip flight from sin-man and was scheduled to fly in the next 24 hours. Prior to departure, she received an email soliciting my sis to top up for a business class upgrade for her itinerary. As she felt the price was reasonable ($3k upgrade top-up), she clicked the link in the email and proceeds on to a payment site on SQ. She was presented with the benefits for the class and without much information to make further judgement, she cleared the payment.
After payment, she was allowed on to her booking management system to choose her seat. It was only then that she realised, she could only select the outbound business class flight and not the inbound but her itinerary is for a round trip. So, she called the customer service immediately and was informed that the offer was for a single way. Upon that discovery, she asked for cancellation of the upgrade top up as the upgrade was vague and is for part of her trip instead and not the whole itinerary. The customer service officer explained that under their fare rules, cancellation is not permitted despite the ordeal happened within the hour and a misconception of situation.
My sister appealed to the officer for consideration and the officer claimed that she will get back to her with updates. Several hours passed but there were no update so we called again and was put on hold for more than an hour and never got a staff or supervisor for an appeal. She made another call again and by chance of luck was able to get to the supervisor and explained the situation to him. However, he wasn’t authorised to reverse and needed higher authority clearance; he would update us separately. Meanwhile, we travelled to SQ customer service centre hoping to get a quicker solution to the problem as by then, the flight was due to depart in less than 24hours. At the centre, we weren’t allowed entry into the centre and had to stand outside whilst assisted by a coordinator who would then convey our concern to a respective staff inside. During which, there were multiple back and forth message conveyancing.
As the centre finally closed, we were then invited to enter the reception area (still standing and had been so probably about an hour already by then). We were served by another staff that was able to directly process the request but were told that the fare rules disallowed any form of cancellation again and completely disregarded her misunderstanding of the upgrade offer bearing in mind that they were explained that my sister was 60years old, have little computer or airline literacy.
The staff proceeded to help with the upgrade refund and warned that the original flight fare class is not available. Thus, my sister has to either top up for the fare differences for the downgrade or departs at a much later date (which is subjected to availability that has the same fare class). Once again, we tried to ask the officer if they could consider checking the fare record and perhaps maintain a close range on the fare differences. As before, they needed authorisation and clearance from higher authority to proceed further in offering a similar economic class fare thereby in other words, reinstating the original arrangement and so we left.
The next day, SQ called and replied that there were able to refund the upgrade and we have to top up to cover the fare differences if my sister wanted to fly to Manchester. Despite the genuine misunderstanding of the upgrade offer because the email wasn’t explicit and informative enough, SQ refused to reinstate the original fare.
In the end, that click in error for the unclear upgrade, my sister was punished to pay an additional $800+ just to be “reinstated” to the original position.
