Welcome to irenelaw.com

Bear with me, super duper long post. Since there’s someone who said that I like to whine and complain a lot, then here you go…

MH = Malaysian Hospitality? Oh… I’m thinking twice about it now. As some of you know, I was one of the media from Kuching who was sent to cover two events last weekend in KL, I had the privilege to fly MH which many people envied and I could also collect Enrich point. It’s my first time being flown to cover event after so many years of blogging! So excited! There were 8 of us from major newspapers in Kuching and I was the only blogger.

Last Friday, 30th September 2013, I went to the airport to take the flight that was supposed to fly at 10.50am. I knew no one from the media that time, saw a few but wasn’t very familiar with them so basically we’re all pretty much strangers to each other. Finally we boarded the plane, sat there, waited for take off. It was an unusual long wait, almost half hour if not mistaken.

Left: I looked up, oh!!! First time saw this hahaha… I was sent a photo of this last year by someone when he was on business trip telling me he’s on such old plane ;p Never thought that I will be seeing it with my own eyes so I took a photo of it while waiting just for the fun of it.

Ok… Before you people start saying that many planes are old, flying more than 20 years and so on but they are maintained at a very high standard. This I know. Don’t have to lecture me on that if you know who I had been in a relationship with before. I am always confident with the airline industry so it doesn’t matter at all to me how old the plane is. If it’s not flight worthy, it won’t be flying. Apart from that, I am in fact looking up to those in this industry with utmost respect. If I am tall enough, I would have apply to be an air-stewardess but too bad I’m not.

I’ve been flying a fair bit these few years. Never did I experience any delay, not with any airline (be it premium or budget, international or domestic, local or foreign carrier, I flew with SQ most of time for international flight when I was in Adelaide) all on time. However, the recent Europe trip, I did experience some delay when we flew back to Kuching with MH, it was a short delay, no big deal. It was my very first flight delay that time. This time… This story, it’s my longest flight delay in my entire life and had to change to another airline to fly at the very last minute.

Back to the story. I almost dozed off waiting because I was pretty sleepy, waking up very early and sleeping late the night before. Suddenly the announcement came, I thought it was just the apology for the delay and we would fly soon but it was asking us to disembark because of technical issue and the flight would delay for maybe 2-3 hours. It’s a good thing all passengers were rather calm about it, didn’t make a fuss at all.

Right: We were compensated with meal voucher. While queuing, we got to know each other as we were practically seated next to each other in the plane. We could claim either from KFC or Marrybrown. KFC we went. So we went out of the departure hall to go to KFC.

From there, we mingled around. Since our event was at night, so we thought that should be fine, as long that we could fly before 4pm, we would be able to make it. So we just informed KL side that our flight was delayed. No one would expect it would delay for more than 3 hours as we were confident that MH should have a better standard than AK. Finally, we heard announcement saying that we could fly by 2.45pm. Excited! Everyone went back to Gate 8 to wait but at 3pm, came another announcement saying that it’s going to be delayed again. Now! We started to panic! However, we still had faith, as long that it could fly by 4pm, we’re still in time.

Then suddenly, someone overheard people saying that the flight was likely to fly only after 7.30pm, a new plane with new set of crew will be flown in. This time, we immediately went back to the counter, tried to request to be slotted into any empty seats in any flight flying out at the same time claimed another meal voucher. There was no way for us to fly before 4pm, by the time we reached KL, the event would long ended already. We immediately informed our sponsor about it. After ding-dong-ding-dong, there’s no way to fly us with MH anymore and the representative of our sponsor from Kuching rushed to the airport at peak hour to “rescue” us and she bought us AK ticket to get us to KL.

Finally! We’re flying but with AK instead of MH. However, we still missed the event. At least we managed to get out of KIA after spending 8-9 hours in KIA! It’s amazing that we were still in surprisingly high spirit despite such delay. I was behind the camera. Photo taken while waiting to board our new flight. We’re a fun group of people 😉

We understood the difficulty of the airline. That’s why we didn’t make a fuss. However, what made us angry was that why there was no one from MH even bother to come out to inform us or check on us (all the economy class passengers, as I’m sure 1st and business class had managed to fly on the next flight) personally? It’s a crazy wait, people were getting frustrated, at least some MH staff should come and distribute bottled water to us as a token of apology or just have a chit chat to check on the passengers’ condition or something but no one showed up at all to do anything except making announcement via the sound system!

Many people also didn’t know they could claim another meal voucher for the wait. Is it so hard? It’s not 2-3 hours delay, it’s more than that. Should there be a simple courtesy by MH to do something to show that MH are truly hospitable? Where’s the Malaysian Hospitality that was promised? There’s also foreigners who got stranded, it’s not only Malaysians. What kind of impression are you giving to those foreigners? This reminds me of the Malay saying, “cakap tak serupa bikin”, means talk only but not executing it.

Just because we’re all flying economy, it doesn’t mean that we were less important than those flying 1st or business class. I am very sure AK is doing better in this part as some of us had experienced delay with AK but were compensated with RM200 voucher. No, don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to request for such compensation from MH but at least show us that MH really cares about us, the Malaysian Hospitality.

MH, I’m disappointed with you.