AFRICA – ARE YOU STILL SELLING TICKETS IN ZIMBABWE?
(Posted 04th December 2015)
#itsarevolution – rest assured there will be one when the passengers of this airline waiting for refunds finally wake up and begin to throw tantrums or head to court!
Fly Africa has finally broken their silence, yet only to throw more sand into the eyes of unsuspecting passengers who may not have followed events closely since the airline was grounded in Zimbabwe on the 28th of October.
Start quote:
flyafrica.comwould like to assure all passengers that we are working tirelessly to resume operations as speedily as possible and remain positive this will be accomplished soon.
Should your flight be cancelled you will be notified accordingly. Passengers booked onwww.flyafrica.comvia our Call Centre or a Sales Office will be notified of the cancellation of their flight via email and/or sms. Travel agents with clients booked through their reservation systems onflyafrica.com will be notified of the cancellation with an update in their client’s reservation. To call a flyafrica.com sales representative please use one of the following numbers +27 10 100 3540, +263 86 770 00312, or +264 83 330 0370.
Allflyafrica.compassengers impacted by these flight cancellations will be offered a refund for their cancelled flight in the original form of payment.
Passengers who have had their flights cancelled are asked to submit a refund request online;http://flyafrica.com/en/main-menu-bar/contact-us. Passengers booked through their travel agent are asked to submit their refund request directly with their travel agent.
End quote
This string of assurances has for the past weeks set one date after another when the mouthpieces of Fly Africa gave hope to passengers, only for such dates to come and go without a single flight taking off. At least these mouthpieces learned one thing apparently, that setting a day and then not fulfilling it was a recipe for growing anger, frustration and worse. From information at hand are passengers starting to seek legal advice over having bought tickets at a time when it was all but clear the airline would not fly and having to wait too long for refunds while their money, when paying for instance with credit cards, ended up in the airline’s coffers in seconds.
Refund deadlines too are now stretched from 30 to 40 DAYS to 30 or 40 WORKING DAYS, sorely testing the patience of those even further who have been struggling to get their money back from an airline which has not been flying for weeks. What, one wonders, does all this mean, for those waiting for their money and for those who are sitting on it?
Not one passenger has yet commented on the airline’s Facebook page that he or she actually has received their money back and the airline has not responded to the publicly asked question just how many refunds they have processed since the 28th of October: ‘Mr. Adrian Hamilton-Manns – how many refunds has your grounded airline paid out … a simple number will do BUT put that number against the other not yet paid refunds so that the public can see just where Fly Africa presently stands’.
Will an answer be forthcoming? Not likely as the management of the company sits in their ‘Wagenburg’ trying to keep themselves together and very likely even looking into the mirror without a feeling of guilt or shame or remorse.
The saga hence continues and feedback is now also awaited from the Namibian Directorate of Civil Aviation over the status of the airline’s AOC there, either directly or via Nomads Aviation after the DCA in Windhoek had also pulled the airline’s operating permit after consultations with their Zimbabwean counterparts.
For breaking and regular aviation from the Eastern side of Africa news look no further but this space.
