An encounter of the air-travel kind

Press, 10 May 1988, Page 26

An encounter of the air-travel kind

By

GARETH POWELL

Computers are blamed for many evils. Flying to London via Bangkok on Qantas on Friday, April 22, I encountered this problem in its purest form. I was booked, I thought, in business class right the way through from Sydney to London. Not so, said the check-in clerk. The computer says you are only going to Bangkok. And therefore to Bangkok you will go. I pointed, in vain, to my ticket that showed quite clearly that I was going to London. And that the flight — 009 — W as printed carefully in the right places showing I would go from Sydney to Bangkok, arriving at 5.30 in the morning, and then off again to London on the same flight and the same aircraft an hour or so la ter - . , , t Interesting though the Qantas clerk found this, he insisted that the computer — that unsmiling damn’d villain — said that I was only going to Bangkok. And that is where he insisted my luggage should go. And that destination — BKK — was also printed on my boarding pass. He was obdurate, for did he not have the support, moral and technical, of the Qantas computer? He did, therefore he could not be wrong. I sat down in the airport lounge and gave myself furiously to think. Filled with a new and sterner resolve, I queued up again and fronted to the counter. This time I asked, with sweet reasonableness, whether I was booked on the Bangkok-London leg of the journey on that very same flight. Indeed, I was. The computer said so. Why could I, therefore, not have a boarding pass to see me right the way through to my final destination? Because the computer said I was not going there. The clerk, also sweetly reasonable, said the computer was quite definite that I was going to Bangkok, and therefore to Bangkok I,would go. He said that probably my travel agent had made a mistake in the booking. (Anyone who knows January — her real name — of VSP Travel, knows that she does not make such mistakes. She had been chasing the booking for two days and had, indeed, confirmed it as late as 4 o’clock that very afternoon. And when she has read this I fear the check-in clerk’s future may be short and brutal.) ■ I asked, somewhat piteously, for the check-in-clerk’s advice. He suggested I get off at Bangkok, check through immigration, collect my suitcase, clear it through customs, and then check in again for the flight.. But, I asked, would this not make me too late for the flight? Not necessarily, he replied encouragingly. He then asked whether I would definitely be

travelling on the Bangkok-London sector so that he could confirm my booking. I allowed that was, indeed, the general idea. As I was boarding the aircraft a ground hostess paged me. She said that I could, after all, stay on the same aircraft with the same boarding pass all the way to London. But my . baggage had gone to Bangkok, had Bangkok destination labels, was already on the aircraft. Not to worry. Through the Qantas electronic communication system — part of its worldwide computer network — she would send a message to Qantas in Bangkok and have the suitcase relabelled. I need worry no further. Being by nature a worry-wart, at Bangkok I spoke to the Qantas supervisor at Don Muang airport as a safety check that all was well. He knew nothing of my case, of a message, of relabelling. He showed me the day’s file of messages. On it I was not. This stalwart chap — are the Thais the most admirable people on earth? I think so — was plainly not a believer in computers, for he charged off into the arrival hall, found my baggage, carried it over, checked it on the London flight and then came back to the transit lounge to present me with my baggage tag. Oh most admirable person. If the Qantas computer program does not allow a wretched person such as myself to fly with a full fare ticket all the way to London without checking in and out of transit stop airports, there is plainly a bug in the program. Correcting it would be no great' problem. If the Qantas programmers feel this is outside their range of capability, I would be pleased to advise, for a small fee. When told of this sad tale, the Australian Airports Operations Director for Qantas, Neil Gibbs, said that no reason could be established for the initial failure of both computerised transactions to make the destination change from Bangkok to London. He didn’t think a bug in the software was to blame. However, he said: “It’s not a common fault but we do from time to time, at the check-in counter, find that we can’t effect a transaction we expect to at that time.” Apologetically, he added: “We blew it. It’s no good kidding ourselves. I don’t know why there was a technical difficulty. As regards to the handling of your baggage — we failed to send the signal that we said we would. It was straight out neglect.”