AF 2:
The work I will be doing in China and which should have begun today is a theatre and art project that is called ‘The Customer Is Always Wrong’ and, it will be presented in cities in China and the UK in 2011 and then tour internationally, like most of my work does. I will include this Air France/KLM incident within the project, it does, after all, fit the title very well. I could almost call it a gift, artistically speaking, so well does it fit. A gift I would rather not receive, but a fitting way to start my show all the same. I will describe this incident and find an artistic language to share the experience of being treated very badly by airlines, something many people will understand, and I will single out KLM and Air France. This will begin my stage show, it will also be written about on my blog and I may make an online video too, if I find a good way to express this. I would say that this will reach an audience of at least several thousand directly and many more indirectly. It will be very negative publicity for you as a company and Linda will not be presented as a sympathetic individual at all. If however you chose to properly correct your mistake, I will include this too within my project and will either drop the issue or give a balanced picture of a mistake properly corrected.
I should also state that I travel literally all the time with my work as an artist and use both Air France and KLM. Based upon yesterday’s experience I will have to withdraw from using Air France and KLM ever again, unless of course you correct this mistake. Avoiding you will not be so convenient for me as my main artistic collaborations are based in Paris and Amsterdam, to which I travel on a monthly basis. I will however do this, all the same, and you will lose certainly custom as a result. All this because of Linda in Dublin not issuing a boarding pass for a flight I had already paid for.
As I will be working in China till mid April it is best to send your correspondence via email as I will not receive post until then.
I look forward to your reply.
Yours faithfully,
Bill Aitchison
Yesterday I wrote to Air France Customer Care:
Dear Sir/Madam,
I am writing to inform of a recent excruciatingly bad experience with Air France / KLM and to ask that you apologise and refund me for it.
The incident happened yesterday on the 29/12/10. I was traveling from New York to London and was delayed by the severe snowstorm in NYC, 25cm of snow in JFK. I was originally meant to leave on the 27/12/10 and arrive in London on the morning of the 28/12/10 but due to flight cancellations and rebookings only left New York on the evening of the 28/12/10 and took a flight to London via Dublin with Aer Lingus that was due to arrive in London at 11.40. This flight got delayed and I only arrived in Dublin at 13.30. My flight with KLM was from London Heathrow at 17.05 to Beijing via Amsterdam. It was not possible to make this connection. The Aer Lingus staff however, offered to book me to their 17.10 Amsterdam flight to make the connecting KLM flight to Beijing (21.25) that evening. This was all perfectly possible and would even have timed out well. The KLM/Air France representative at your ticket sales desk in Dublin however, a woman named Linda, would not issue me with the boarding pass for the Amsterdam – Beijing flight. She said the booking was non-changeable and that if I did not use the first part of the flight from London to Amsterdam the entire reservation would be considered as a ‘no show’ and cancelled. I told her about the snow in New York and the severe delays I had encountered and she made a sarcastic comment about their being ‘no snow here! It’s not our problem.’ I had the sense that she had the attitude of a person who enjoys saying no, that she was enjoying the power.
The fact that you have already taken my money for your booking and had reserved a place on the flight for me but were unwilling to issue me a boarding pass is what upsets me. The extreme inflexibility in the face of severe transport difficulties, inflexibility that would have cost you absolutely nothing at all, is plainly rude. The rude comments of your staff Linda only made this poor decision more annoying still. As a result of this I have now lost the entire booking: both my flight to China and the return flight back to the UK with Air France via CDG in April 2011. This alone has coast me £566. I have had to book a new flight. Needless to say, I have not booked this with you; I will travel with Turkish Airlines later today. What is more, I have lost time, I was due to start work in China on a project of mine and this is now delayed. All because Linda would not authorise a boarding card.
(cont)
I discovered a curious thing with the words ‘hui’ come and ‘qu’ go. If I want to say I will go to China in 2 weeks (which I will more or less) then I use the word ‘qu’. If however a Chinese person living in London was going to China in two weeks, they would use the word ‘hui’. Even though they might be living in London the fact that they are Chinese means that they would use the word come where I would use the word go if, for example, I was living in Beijing and was making a trip to London. Well that is what I heard from one of my language partners, the other, from Taiwan, gave me a different story so now I don’t know what to think exactly except that there are many ways the language and its many dialects can be spoken.
I wonder if this rule, when it is a rule, applies indefinitely, and if China or the ‘Centre County’ has us down as a far away province, linguistically speaking. The language came into being a long time ago when the UK must have been an obscure island to the far West. On a contemporary Chinese world map the UK is over there on the top left hand side.
I also read the other day that a Chinese admiral was meant to have discovered America before Columbus.
