KOTA KINABALU: Inconsistent, unpredictable, unprofessional, unreasonable and uncaring—these are some of the words that businessmen here use when they talk about MasWings, a three-year old Malaysian Airlines subsidiary serving 42 routes covering 22 destinations in Sabah and Sarawak.
“MasWings is even worse than the most horrible bus service,” said Sabah Medical Centre chairman Chu Chee Kuen. “We want the federal and state governments to step in and do something about the worsening service it provides.”
Chu said he was speaking on behalf of a group of businessmen who want to bring their woes to the attention of the public and the authorities.
The airline was launched after Air Asia handed back the inter-town routes in the two states to Malaysia Airlines following a second rationalization exercise.
MasWings, the consensus holds, is inconveniencing tourists, investors and other travelers and directly and indirectly causing enormous losses to the business community.
Members of Chu’s group say Malaysia Airlines is equally erratic with its flights between Kuala Lumpur and Sabah, but the focus of their collective wrath is MasWings. Flights have even been cancelled, delayed or re-timed, they lament, but only to take off on short notice as per the original schedule.
In Chu’s opinion, the airline is run like a government department by people who lack business ethics and good corporate governance.
“There’s no public confidence in MasWings,” he said. “There is massive frustration and anger.”
Constant state of disruption
He pointed out that if business meetings, private functions and tourist schedules were constantly disrupted, “there will be a domino effect and it will be difficult to plan with certainty.”
He cited MasWings’s topsy-turvy flight schedules as a particularly sore point with the business community.
According to him, flights between Kota Kinabalu and towns on Sabah’s east coast, for example, have been in a constant state of disruption since early this year and there are no signs that the situation will improve.
“The result has been enormous inconvenience to the business community and we are not being compensated for it,” he fumed. “The unpredictability of departure and arrival times is playing havoc with business meetings and appointments.”
Chu concedes that MasWings does inform passengers through the short messaging service whenever there are changes to flight schedules. However, he takes issue with the airline informing passengers at the last minute, often when they are on the way to the airport. He wonders about the fate of passengers who travel without mobile phones or with faulty phones.
One bright spot is that the counter staff at the airports “handle the frustrations and criticisms of passengers quite professionally”.
According to Chu, the airline appears to be short-staffed and seems to be offering too many flights that were either overbooked or not taken up at reasonable levels. The result, he has surmised, is that it attempts to offload passengers from overbooked flights to other flights which may not necessarily be the next available flight but could be very early in the morning, late at night or even the next day.
Give specific details
He finds overbooking of flights a questionable marketing tactic as the airline should know that passengers choose flights to suit their schedules. However, the airline does not seem to have any qualms over luring passengers to a particular flight and then not hesitating to bounce them to other flights when the original choice of flight is over-booked.
“In the case of under-booked flights, the airline doesn’t hesitate to cancel them and transfer the passengers to other flights,” said Chu. “They wait until the very last minute to do this.”
A spokesman for MasWings, when asked to respond to Chu’s criticism, said the airline could not deal with complaints of a general nature. He advised dissatisfied passengers to direct their complaints to the airline with specific details.
MasWings serves the Sabah and Sarawak sector with ten ATR 72-50 (68 passengers), a Fokker 50 (50 passengers) and a DHC-60 Twin Otter (19 passengers).
“In order to provide hassle-free services”, the airline is also offering charter services of its aircraft within the two Malaysian Borneo states. But this is subject to aircraft and technical crew availability. The Fokker, which will be retired soon, is not available for charter.
Generally, these charter services are from Miri to Mulu, Laying-Layang, Mukah and Marudi.
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