Life was never meant to be easy- this phrase became truly meaningful with my recent experience booking some flights with Malaysian Airlines.

Saturday arvo mid June, freezing cold Sydney, I thought to myself “Hmmm not a bad time to head home to sunny Malaysia for a bit of tropical heat.” I picked up the phone and dialed our local Flight Center. Monique was very helpful, within 20 odd minutes we were booked on a return flight Sydney- K.L. Great dates, not bad price despite the short notice and the very hectic holiday travel season. Satisfied, I sat back to enjoy the rest of the weekend. All I had to do now was wait for Thursday to pay and have the bookings ticketed.

Thursday rolled in quickly enough, credit card in hand I called Monique. Guess what, one of the kid’s name had been misspelled on the booking. I rolled it over in my head technically – surely that would just mean doing a simple “update” on the system. Oh no, no chance in hell, there was no such thing as an update, the booking with the misspelled name had to be cancelled and a new booking re entered. Of course by now there were no seats left – AAArgggh! MAS didn’t care “.. your son will not be able to travel with the rest of the family ma’am, you’ll just have to leave him behind, you can try to wait list, but its looking unlikely, and oh yeah, there is absolutely nothing we can do…”

Who in their right mind creates a flight booking system (or any bloody system at all), without building into it an “update” facility, for crying out loud! “Oh oh maam, its due to all the terrorist issues these days maam, cannot change name lah…” okay, I can understand it if the ticket was already issued perhaps, and even then!! but in this case, it was only a booking!!!

Sigh, what can I say, I think we’ll fly SIA from now on. God only knows what other functions they have conveniently not built into their inflight systems!

Updating is for wusses..