I have just returned from a trip to the Philippines. Every time I take a domestic flight I would book online through the Philippine Airlines (PAL) website. But there is often something wrong with their system, as when I made bookings for this trip. Even the PAL in Bangkok informed me that many customers contacted them about this. When I made a booking and entered my credit card details on 7 Jan, PAL did not give me confirmation of the flight I booked. The message said to contact onlinebooking@pal.com.ph to ask for verification but there was no reply (as always). So I called my credit card company (CCC) to check if the payment registered in their system and lo and behold, CCC informed me that the payment was approved! That means I paid PAL for something they did not deliver. My CCC instructed me to contact PAL to tell them to cancel the payment within 14 days so it will not be billed to me. So I sent an email on 7 Jan to webmgr@pal.com.ph (Ms. Claire Cornelio) about this and she immediately forwarded it to their Fulfillment Center (onlinebooking@pal.com.ph) - the same one I sent an email to earlier. This is the email address that appears in the PAL website to contact for any online booking information but they are not replying or it takes them days to reply. In this case, they have not replied at all.
It is now 29 Jan. I have just received my CC statement and the charge is still there. That means PAL Fulfillment Center has not done anything to correct this mistake. I contacted my CCC again just this morning and they said that PAL has not contacted them to cancel this transaction. I do hope PAL will get their act together after so many years of being proud they are Asia's first. Hope they will live up to their slogan. First and not last or late in everything.
2 comments:
Palpak indeed. That's why I have a fear of doing online bookings or payments.
Sometimes it will take you a month for the chargeback to be processed but I hope this will get fixed soon.
milai hope so, thanks. i think it's just because PAL is so inefficient. there should have been no problem if they acted on it right there and then. this is the first time it came to this. one time i purchased globe load at myayala.com and paid through paypal and there was some error, but myayala.com immediately acted on it i.e. right after the mistake was made and so it was cancelled.
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