Sunday, October 11, 2009

Malev steals from luggage ?

I decided to write this post following a sad incident with Malev, the Hungarian national air company, that has never been addressed or follown up by them.
I hope this will be indexed as good as a previous post related to the Hungarian motorway vignette and make enough people aware of what they could get exposed to, when travelling with Malev.

The introduction:

Some two weeks ago, my mother in law took the airplane back to Cluj, via Budapest, after a wonderful week spent with us in Brussels. The Malev offer (about 140€ and five hours from Cluj to Zaventem - return ticket) was very appealing, especially when you know how difficult it is to fly on the route Cluj-Belgium.
She gets to Budapest, she goes for the transfer and while boarding in, she is literally obliged not to take any hand luggage. Not very happy, but, fine... what can she do? In the rush, she forgets to remove the valuables from her hand luggage.
She gets to Cluj and, you guessed, money is missing from the luggage.

Development:

She goes over to the Cluj Airport authorities to fill-in a complaint and there she mets another person in the same situation. The reaction of the airport staff: "No, not on the Malev-Budapest route, again!". It looks like this kind of incident is as common as the flight itself.
In the next days, she follows the story up with the Malev office in Romania while I wrote them an e-mail.
Result: no reaction.

Conclusion:

Despite the very often occurence of theft from luggage on the Malev flights, as described here or here, the company doesn't take any action.
Moreover, they don't reply to customer complaints.
It is of course a frustrating situation, but let's not underestimate the power of information, these days. See Dave Carroll case and the United Breaks Guitars song :).
Now, I wouldn't like to spend my time writting a song or poetry about Malev stealing from luggage, but nobody will keep me from suspecting the involvment of the company in these facts, for as long as not only they don't cover any damage or don't get back to their complaining customers, but they even push people to giving away their hand luggage in a rush, just like in a dirty pick-pocket trick.

Suggestion:

If you were victim of a similar situation, don't hesitate to refer this post on your own blog. This will increase the awarness of internet surfers and hopefully the situation will somehow get fixed, sooner or later.
If you think of taking a Malev flight, think twice. Your end cost for the travel may well end-up being more expensive than any other business class trip.

Good luck!