It is not a news that the customer service that all the Middle Eastern airlines Emirates, Etihad and Qatar Airways “provide” is appalling. I have covered these here in LoyaltyLobby number of times.
A LoyaltyLobby reader just sent me an email how he was able to resolve the Etihad Guest Gold status match from the February campaign (read more here and here) after emailing back and forth with the customer service for weeks.
You can access Etihad’s web page for Guest status levels here.
Here’s copy of the email that I received from the reader:
Following your item regards Etihad matching Gold Status, I emailed Etihad all the right details as required in February.
The last 2 months I have been fobbed off by poor Customer Service.
At 1000hrs yesterday I sent the email trail to customer services, copying in Etihad’s CEO (jhogan@etihad.ae), and received a call from Etihad Customer Services within 20 minutes making huge apologies. I received my membership via email within another 30 minutes.
It may be worth sharing this as Etihad Customer Services is appalling.
Conclusion
Why these airlines don’t get it that they will eventually lose customers and money by not providing good customer service? Cutting corners on customer service is very shortsighted.
If you are offering a status match campaign to poach frequent fliers, wouldn’t you think that it would be on their best interest to provide the absolute best service?
It shouldn’t require CC the CEO or complain to the DOT to get issues resolved, but unfortunately that is often the case nowadays.
![Airfare of the Day [Business Class] ETIHAD London to Cape Town from £1,426](https://cdn3.loyaltylobby.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/xafrica-gdf4db5c29_1280-cape-town-350x250.jpg.pagespeed.ic.AYEFKivr4D.jpg)
![Airfare of the Day [Business Class] ETIHAD Jakarta to Milan from $864](https://cdn5.loyaltylobby.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/xchurch-622015_1280-MILAN-350x250.jpg.pagespeed.ic.FPW6QDU_SC.jpg)
On the other hand I must admit that I was given very good customer service by Etihad. Quick status match process. When I lost a card and requested new one my e-mail was replied within a day.
Thanks for CEO email. I have been threatened (“I could put you into jail here”) by an Etihad staff at AUH airport when I found that my flight was overbooked and my confirmed seat was given to someone else as I didn’t do e-checkin even if I arrived at airport 2-hours before departure. So I complained about it at that time. Later I contacted my Etihad CSR with regard to this situation but only got a sort of copy & paste indifferent response. I am re-sending this “cc”ing to CEO.
Etihad customer service is horrible. I’m a Gold Elite (new Platinum) for 3 years and have been Gold since 2008. Had a horrible First Class from NY to AUH (from pre-boarding, to boarding to inflight) and also from AUH to IAD. After back-and-forth with their customer service dept, their response in terms of a gesture was “we have shared your comments with the relevant dept”. What?! Sharing customer experience is considered a gesture?! They offered 5000 miles – I told them to keep it. They upped it a bit, but regardless – absolutely horrendous.
Admittedly I had just a basic information request (that could not be answered by Google search or the Etihad website) that had gone unanswered for weeks by Etihad Social Media response team, but thanks to this tip (which I used this morning) I got that information by this afternoon. So it looks like if something gets stuck, this can help.
I should also say that while it may be said the ME3 have a way to go in improving ground customer services, in my fairly wide experience with Western airlines is that poor ground customer service is found with them too. All airlines need to pull their socks up here.
Here’s an interesting one. This week I received an e-mail, asking me to confirm my registration with Etihad. I hadn’t registered at all, but I had applied for the gold card status match. Never received an answer, not even a confirmation of my status match application by the way. So sent them a mail back saying that I was very unimpressed with the way they had handled it, and that I wasn’t in the least interested in their card if they would drop me in their entry-level.
Promptly received an answer that they were going to look into it. Who knows, maybe they’ll still get their act together?