ads and air asia

how many of you have taken a flight/s with air asia before? how do you find it? i have never use air asia before so don’t know anything about it.

well, as you are aware few days ago, air asia was accused of misleading advertising. a consumer group in johor started it, then our arts, culture and tourism minister, abdul kadir joined in. the minister said that air asia promote its low-cost fare in the ads but these low cost fares are only available for 30% to 30% of the seats.

i guess this is true because my uncle, a frequent plane traveller told me so. he said the low-cost fares are limited. one have to book for it fast before it is ‘sold out’. so in a way the minister was right… but yet when air asia boss tony fernandez defended its ads and insisted to continue advertising its cheap fares. i feel he was right too. tony justified the ads as not misleading with this:

‘if the airline is doing things wrongly, no one would want to fly with it. instead, we recorded a 90 per cent passenger load in december alone.’

well while it is true that the cheap fares are allocated for only certain small percentage of seats, some may look to the ads as misleading, while some may not. you see, actually many other companies are into this kind of ‘misleading ad’, or better known as ‘gimmick’. for example i usually spy at the photocopy shops, the sign that said ‘3 cents per copy’ and when i went to enquire, they said the 3 cents for over 100 copies only. so isn’t the ‘3 cents per copy’ ad. misleading? then what about those electrical shops that say advertise ‘a TV for RM50 only’ and when you go there, they’ll say you have to buy some other items to get the TV at RM50. (and we know of course they hiked up the other items prices). well, i’m sure you have come across misleading ads many times eh? since they are just gimmicks, i guess it’s not wrong to say they are wrong!

this same uncle of mine who is a frequent traveller, told me that once after buying his ticket from air asia, about 12 hours before he was due to depart, air asia sms him to tell him that the time of his flight had been changed. ayoh! like that one you see. last minute, suka-suka, they will change the time. but he experienced this only once from many of his air asia trip… and he did continue to use air asia after the sms alert of changing of flight departure time.

i guess despite some people saying that air asia is not so reliable as the other airline, they still prefer to travel by air asia… because of the cheap fares, and also because it’s so easy to book the ticket online. many people don’t mind the ‘no frills’ when they don’t have to fork out more from their pocket!