How we got scammed by Thai Lion Air
This is a warning to fellow travellers. It is a story how Thai Lion Air low fare airline maximises its profits by scamming their customers in order to squeeze most money out of you at the airport check-in. As travellers and frequent flyers (average 1 flight/week), we haven’t experienced anything similar.
UPDATE: It turned out that many many more people got scammed by Thai Lion Air, read reviews on TripAdvisor.
The Story (for TL;DR; skip this section)
After booking online, we’ve received an email confirmation, as it is standard practice. In the email, there’s a following section:
Nothing surprising there. So, a day before the flight, we try to check-in. We get following error message: “A system error has occurred. Please try again later.” OK. Doesn’t really instil confidence in the airline but s**t happens.
During the day, we tried at least ten more times, always same error. OK, happens. Guess they still need to fix some stuff. Being in tech waters, I felt more emphatic with engineers than upset by the fact we still haven’t managed to check in.
Same error message in the morning. Shortly after, online check-in was closed. Well, that kind of sucks because online check-in is where you double-check you have everything covered; like luggage, for example. If you need checked luggage, you buy it at regular price during online check-in process. This is a standard practice. Moreover, with Thai Lion Air, you pay your luggage 50 THB per kg (1,5EUR). Side note: for this reason, it makes even more sense to actually pay for luggage once you know how much luggage you actually have! Have you ever seen a flight where you pay per kg, starting with 1kg? We haven’t. This is already a warning sign. You either pay too much or overpay at check-in counter.
“OK, s**t,” we say to ourselves, “we’ll check in at the airport.”
Once we arrive at the airport good 2 hours before the flight, these are roughly the events that unfolded.
Lady at the check-in: “Mr., you don’t have extra luggage covered.”
“Really? OK,” I said, “it happens. How much do we need to pay extra?”
“500 THB for 1kg,” she says.
We do quick calculation and realise this makes roughly 20000 THB for 2x20 kg luggage. That’s 555 EUR for 2x20 kg!?!
“WTF!?!? That’s more than a ticket from Europe to Asia. That’s 3 times the tickets we paid with Thai Lion Air. We tried to check-in online but it didn’t work, ” I say and show the above screenshot.
“International flights can’t use online check-in.”
“Where do you say this? In the email it only says, we should check-in online 24 hrs before the flight. Why would it say this if online check-in for the flight is not available?”
No answer but also no surprised faces. The situation grows dodgy by the moment.
“Can we find a cheaper option?”, we ask,
“You can buy new tickets and buy cheaper luggage with those tickets.”
“Wow. What a solution. Buy another ticket for the flight you already bought a ticket for. Well, how much do new tickets cost?”
“250 EUR each”
“F*** **u, ” I thought to myself but haven’t just yet uttered the phrase in the hope that constructive dialog continues. “Can we speak with the supervisor?”
“No.”
“Is there anything we can do?”
“No.”
At that time, I was becoming more aggravated and another Thai Lion Air employee with ID number TL140574 steps in, basically indicating we either pay, leave, or deal with security.
We left the check-in and went to customer care, because they, uhm, (should) care. We weren’t alone there. There were 4 similar cases at that moment, total 6 persons. The mother and daughter in front of us just paid a bit less than 10k THB (approx. 280 EUR) for their luggage and said it out loud that they were scammed. We were next (to get scammed).
We repeated procedure and we asked: “How should we book additional luggage online if the check-in does not work?”
No answer.
“You tell in the confirmation mail, we should check-in online 24hrs prior. It is also nowhere stated that online check-in does not work for international flights. Moreover, the error msg we got has nothing to do with actual problem! How do you explain this?”.
No answer again. Nor did the lady at the booth show any surprise. Man, if I’d be a poker player, I would take notes. This is obviously happening all the time (and 6 affected persons at that moment are quite supporting this assumption).
After much pleading and looking for solutions, we came down to 11500 THB (cca. 320 EUR) additional expenses. That would be one new ticket and we would need to split the luggage while we still weren't sure if all of our luggage would be covered by that as 16 kg were not accounted in the offer. And we also didn’t get an answer for that.
We were asking again for the supervisor.
“This is where you can write.” And she hands me this note:
info@thailionair.com? Yes, I’m sure I’ll be able to sort it all out there within next 30 mins before the check-in on the airport closes. Thank you but we would like to cancel the tickets and get at least airport taxes refunded. We are not going to participate in this scam anymore.
Why is this a scam and what are dark UX patterns?
First, dark UX patterns are:
“Dark Patterns are deceptive UX/UI interactions, designed to mislead or trick users to make them do something they don’t want to do” (source: uxdesign.cc).
Dark UX patterns are a big deal, LinkedIn was fined 13 mio USD in 2015 for doing this (https://www.fastcompany.com/3051906/after-lawsuit-settlement-linkedins-dishonest-design-is-now-a-13-million-problem). As the definition tells, dark patterns are used to deceive customers. And exactly this is what Thai Lion Air does:
- It starts with charging extra luggage by kg. Who can exactly know weeks before leaving how much luggage they will have? So you either overpay online or later.
- There’s no mentioning that online check-in does not work for international flights. Quite the opposite, you’re instructed to do so, leaving you in the dark about what is going to happen at the airport. Plus, all the tries took some time and effort. And worry.
- Without online-check in, you can’t pay for extra luggage at regular prices. Whatever you do at the airport, it won’t come cheap.
- Because you can’t check-in online, you have to check-in at the airport. Without any contact numbers to call or supervisors to speak to, you can’t really do anything. Gatekeepers are well trained.
- So, you end up with the decision: either you overpay the luggage or you don’t fly. The price for 1kg of luggage is 10x times the original price.
If it looks and smells like a scam, then it most likely is.
Conclusion
Well, we didn’t take the Thai Lion Air option. It would mean we accept Thai Lion Air dark practices. We canceled the flight and in 45 days we get airport tax refunded (approx 60 EUR for both). While waiting for the paperwork from Thai Lion Air, we’ve booked already an Air Asia flight six hours later for approx. 400 EUR (luggage included). We paid more but not partaking in Thai Lion Air scam anymore was well worth it.
This gave us time to write this blog post as a warning to fellow travellers.
What more can be done?
Unfortunately, legally, it’s as much as we can do unless an activist lawyer is reading this; in Europe, we’d know better where to turn to. Or if there’s maybe many of us, a legal suit like the one against Linked In (link above) can be prepared. Again, legal experts should tell.
Online, there’s more to do. Spread the word, clap, share it, link to this post, etc. If you had a similar experience, please describe it in comments.
Let’s put some pressure on Thai Lion Air to start acting ethically or at least avoid their scam.
