Its been a crazy couple of weeks recently so sorry for the lack of posts. But Jet2.com have annoyed me enough to sit down and give my thoughts on their customer service.
I am out visiting some friends in Europe right now. I’ve been here a while. I decided I would fly some people out from home at my own cost since I miss them. Any easy thing to organise? Well, you would think so.
Excellent I thought - just had a real nice affiliate payout and a few flights won’t cost much anyway. You can’t really put a price on seeing your loved ones so worth every penny.
Onto the Jet2.com website I went - booked three returns from Edinburgh to Prague. I received no confirmation email. I decided I would check it next day.
Next day comes, and not a single email from Jet2.com. Into my Paypal account I went, and the payment is showing as “pending”.
(click image to enlarge)
Jet2.com Paypal
So as I stand at that point, I have no confirmed flights, no contact from Jet2.com, and the money in Paypal is not available for me to use anywhere else since its held on an authorisation for Jet2.com.
At this point I’m getting concerned - if this was an ipod or something it would probably still be like this a week later and I wouldn’t have bothered doing anything about it. But flights are hugely time sensitive, they keep rising in price and of course then become completely unavailable when the plane is sold out.
So of course I take the web developers preferred way of contacting a business - back onto the jet2.com home page and find their email address/contact form, should be easy right? Well you would think so!
The only email address listed is this one:
Press Office
Email: pressoffice@jet2.com
FOR ENQUIRIES FROM MEMBERS OF THE PRESS ONLY. Please note this is solely for queries from members of the press. For customer queries please read the information above.
And that “information above” would be a premum rate phone number only! At this point its starting to feel like a total scam. Take my booking, freeze my payment, then demand I call a premium rate phone number to sort it all out???
Then I realise I can get another email address - there has to be one attached to the Paypal payment, so I dig this out and send an email to paypalgbp@jet2.com. Next day I get a canned response:
THIS IS AN AUTOMATIC ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF RECEIPT OF YOUR EMAIL. PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL AS REPLIES TO AUTO ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS WILL REMAIN UNANSWERED
Thank you for your email to paypalgbp@jet2.com
If your query is relating to a PayPal payment enquiry please contact PayPal directly on 08707 307 191 or www.paypal.co.uk
If your query is relating to a Jet2.com booking issue please contact our Call Centre on 0906 302 0660*.Thank you.
*This number is charged at 50p per minute. Calls from mobiles and some networks may cost more. The opening hours are Monday-Friday 0800-2100 and Saturday-Sunday (and bank holidays) 0900-1700.
Brilliant, another change to speak to an idiot in a call centre and be charged 50p a minute for it.
I tracked down another phone number for them, which was an 0113 (Leeds). Their own customer service told me the fastest way to have someone look at it was to initiate a Paypal dispute.
This sounds a bizarre way to carry out customer service - can any of you website owners imagine horrendously inflating your complaints rate in Paypal and dealing with your customer service through the Paypal disputes system? This seems crazy.
But hey, anything to get it sorted and off to file a dispute we go. After locating the transaction, I got this:
This transaction cannot be disputed at this time. This is usually because the transaction has not yet been completed. If this is a completed transaction, please double check that the Transaction ID you selected refers to a payment that you sent.
So because the Payment is being held, I can’t actually dispute it. Jet2.com just sent me on a wild Goose chase again.
I got back on the phone to them and after being on hold for far too long I finally got put through to an Indian chap. After looking into it, he informed me my booking had been cancelled! Remember they have not contacted me at all - they just went ahead and cancelled my booking without even letting me know. With a little further prodding, he said the cancellation was “my fault” but couldn’t actually tell me why. He then insisted I would need to rebook the flights.
At this point I was gutted - it was looking like my family visit was going to be canceled because Jet2.com cancelled my order. (surely I had a contract with them when I paid via Paypal?). I have absolutely no idea why this ended up cancelled - it was certainly nothing to do with my bank since I paid from Paypal balance, they don’t even come into it.
Now here is where it could have gotten a whole lot worse for some people - thankfully in my position I was okay. If I wanted to rebook at that point with Jet2.com it was now going to cost me £420 - £90 more than I originally agreed to pay. So when jet2.com rip you off, they force you to call premium rate numbers, then charge you another £90 on top of what both parties originally agreed was the price!
Of course the original £324 is still held for authorisation by Jet2.com - I can’t use that to partially fund the new, more expensive flights. So I need to shell out a further £420 of my own money to book the exact same flights, again.
What do you do if you don’t have that extra money? How many people can afford to pay £740 for 3 flights to Prague, and not even get any of it back until after the trip is completed? I’m in a reasonably fortunate position, so it didn’t force me to cancel the trip. But what if I didn’t have that money? With people with time off work, hotels booked and paid for, this would be disgusting if Jet2.com’s customer service (or complete lack of it) forced the trip to end right here.
Jet2.com - get your act together. Canceling someones booking without telling them is nothing short of disgusting. Refusing to make the money available to them immediately, to allow them to make alternate travel plans just makes it worse.
I would never recommend anyone to fly Jet2.com again. I realise cheap airlines are never going to have the service of BA or KLM - thats absolutely fine. You pay less, you get less - we all understand the concept. But I have never had the same problems with Easyjet, Ryanair or any other cheap airline. They do what they say on the tin - get you somewhere with minimal fuss and minimal price. Jet2.com, please take note.
10th September 2009 update
Seems at least someone at Jet2 has taken notice of my post, feel free to get in touch and I’ll post whatever you have to see here. 30 pageviews and hovering over that contact form a couple of times, come on lets hear what you have to say about this… Oh and my original Paypal funds are still frozen.
Dart Group Plc own Jet2.com. (click image to enlarge)
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
Thats unbelievable… I’m assuming they do it regularly enough for the woman in Leeds to tell you to file a paypal complaint. Make sure you post an update when this whole thing is resolved…
Thanks Gene,
I’m guessing that was just someone in a call centre with no clue what they are talking about since it couldn’t actually be disputed at that point. I have no idea though, I’m just guessing.
I’ve updated the post with Jet2’s access to this site, maybe if they are going to keep coming back and reading this they want to make a comment?
My friend worked for Jet2 Customer Services and she said it was a disgusting place - they treat the staff worse than the customers. Pretty hard to do, but they managed it
Just had the same thing happen to me but I actually got a message to say the Paypal payment had failed! I then paid using my credit card instead but then when I checked my email I had a pending payment email from Paypal and also a flight confirmation email from jet2 for the payment on my credit card.
I think I’ll wait to see what happens with the pending Paypal payment before I do anything.
We moved from Holland to England, last week of August 2009. We took a lot of bags and suitcases with us. On the flight we lost one of them. And that’s where the problem started.
Jet2.com was so kind as to send us a letter to inform us about this…
Only: they sent it to our old address in Holland. So we got the letter a month after it was mailed to us. I wonder: why didn’t they get in touch with us by sending us by the letter to our new address? Or by sending us an e-mail? Or plainly calling us?
Their letter stated that we had to send them a letter back with our telephone number. So we did, almost two weeks ago. Now we’re waiting for Jet2.com to call us… There’s no other way to get in touch with them. I called their call center and their customer service department: nobody can help me but Carol Richie: she’s the customer service co-ordinator. And she doesn’t have a phone. She doesn’t have e-mail. She can only by reached by the Brittish postal services. Unbelievable!
Erik, hopefully they will sort it out but don’t hold your breath.
By far the biggest search terms sending traffic to my site are jet2 related, and a lot of them from frustrated people looking for phone numbers.
Come on people, if you’ve landed on my little site because a Jet2.com problem, please spend a minute and tell the story - enough complaints in the public and they might actually do something about it for once.
For anyone interested, here is my list of current top referring keywords, look how dominating Jet2.com are:
drill down 5 2.99% jet2 email address
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drill down 4 2.40% jet2 customer services
drill down 4 2.40% searchengineoptimisation.org.uk
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Oh and I realise its a month since I posted, I went backpacking. New post coming up over the weekend I hope!
I booked 2 flights to Murcia the other evening. I opted to pay in euros using my Maestro card but when I clicked on the ‘make payment’ button I got a message on screen saying it was unable to process the transaction due to errors. I checked the page and was satisfied there were no such error and clicked on the ‘make payment’ icon again - only to receive the same message. The message was quite cryptic and not very user friendly but I eventually decided it was referring to my choice of currency method. I went back and changed the payment currency to £sterling and it worked. The payment seemed to go through and a printable booking confirmation report was produced showing the total amount of £63.04. I printed this off.
A few minutes later I got 2 emails with 2 different booking references so I immediately contacted my bank who confirmed that one single debit of over £120 was deducted by Jet2!! Obviously when they say they cannot process a payment - the website is lying!!! They are refusing to refund the extra amount deducted and say it is my fault!!!! What????? Single mum, 3 weeks before Xmas - no fun at all. I am looking at taking this to a small claims court as it just seems incredible that they should get away with this sort of internet ‘theft’. Any thoughts??
We just got back from a disasterous trip with jet2. On the flight out, we were redirected because of snow. Fair enough, but then we were kept on the plane, on the runway for just under 12 hours, rather than letting us in the airport. This was meant to be a 2 hour flight and 2 hour transfer. The only reason we were taken off was because the flight crew had finished their shift.
On the return flight they lost our bags. Apparently, if the plane is too heavy, they offload all the ski/snowboard equipment they can to save weight. This seems ridiculous seeing as you pay an extra £20-40 in order to be able to get wintersports equipment on the plane. Why would they let you do that if they cant handle the extra weight on the plane?
Anyway, still no sign of our bags. And of course, we cant contact Jet2 other than phone or mail. The phoneline costing 50p plus is a joke. It takes at least ten minutes to get through the “PRESS 1 TO MAKE A BOOKING” crap, at which point youve already spent a fiver. I just want to email someone. Why, in 2010 does a company like this not have an email address? Even my gran has an email address.
The same thing has just happened to me like Shane sabove. The first Paypal attempt seemd to fail and Jet2 said it had failed, so I had to try again. The 2nd Paypal payment went through (using my backup card)
I now have one booking reference and two Paypal Debits for over £500 each !! - Although one is “Pending” so it will hopefully be cancelled.
What is the 0113 number for Jet2 by the way please ?