There is no more dishonest airline than TAP Portugal
This is an update and a final of my review of TAP from below that I posted couple of months ago. At about the same time I also sent a complaint with more-or-less the same text as this review to Autoridade Nacional da Aviação Civil (ANAC), which is a Portuguese Civil Aviation Authority and National Enforcement Body of Regulation (EC) 261/2004 of the European Parliament setting the rules in respect to cancelled and delayed flights inside the EU. I was not asking for any personal compensation for my wife and myself for all that "cancelled due technical reason" circus that we have to live through in Lisbon airport in the beginning of August. I was just letting them know about this massive fraud scheme run by TAP.
Miraculously, less than a month after that TAP itself showed-up in my mailbox. Saying they received my complaint through ANAC and asking me for account details they should transfer a compensation to us to. No "blah, blah, blah we are working on improving" like all airlines always answer. I sent them account details and within a week 2 x euro 400 = 800 showed-up.
Which just proves what I said in my review: TAP knows very well that they are breaking the law running their "business optimization through flights cancellation" scheme. So, they prefer to try to shut up people complaining to authorities with money to keep their actions low profile.
All in all, if anyone who is reading this had the same experience and had their TAP flight cancelled "due to technical reasons" - don't complaint to TAP itself. It is like complaining to the thief about a theft he did. Send your complaint to ANAC and get the money for the ordeal TAP put you through. The more people will manage to get compensations from TAP, the higher the chance is that they stop running these massive cancellations and abusing thousands and thousands of their passengers.
Initial story is here again:
My wife and myself happened to be among thousands of passengers being abused by TAP during their grand scam scheme they are running at least since May this year (maybe longer). We were supposed to fly in Business Class on TP752 flight from Lisbon to Frankfurt on the 3rd of August. Next day in the afternoon we had a flight booked from Frankfurt to Anchorage, AK, USA - we planned to spend a night in Frankfurt hotel arriving a day earlier just trying to avoid problems in case TAP flight will be delayed or very delayed, like they always are. But we couldn't foresee what happened in reality even in the worst dreams.
When we were checking-in our luggage, we received boarding passes having a very strange detail: boarding time was listed to be at 19:15, while the actual departure time of the flight - 18:20. I am traveling extensively for many years both for business and pleasure, but I have never seen a boarding pass looking like this. When I asked TAP employee, who was checking us in, he also looked surprised, looked into the computer and said: "oh, yes, your flight it delayed by 1 hour 35 minutes".
OK, we went to TAP Business lounge and stayed there "following the screens". At about 19:00 there was shown that our gate is 16 and "we should go to gate". Which is what we did and when we arrived at the gate all passengers of our flight were already lining-up in front of the gate ready to board.
At 19:50 there was an announcement that our flight is delayed by another 30 minutes. And at 20:20, exactly 2 hours after scheduled departure there was yet another announcement that our flight is cancelled "due to technical reasons" and that we are supposed to come to gate 18 for new boarding passes at 21:15. After this 2 TAP employees that were present at our gate just turned and walked away.
It sounded very weird that we should wait nearly 1 more hour and then go to some other gate to deal with this unpleasant issue at hand. So, we just went to gate 18 directly. There we found a huge shapeless crowd of very agitated and nervous people. At the head of the crowd there were 2 TAP employees only. Is it our flight that is being sorted already? I asked one of the passengers leaving the crowd with a new boarding pass in hand. He is from a flight hat was supposed to leave for Brussels at 16:00 that was cancelled, he said. And now 4,5 hours later than he should have actually left Lisbon, he received a new boarding pass for tomorrow.
There were 2 police officers and 2 employees of a private security company at gate 18 too looking at everything going on. So, TAP understood very well how much they abuse the passengers, but instead of getting more of their employees to deal with new boarding passes, they just asked for police and private security presence to keep everyone's natural anger under control - because they don't have to pay for police and airport security.
Seeing that there is absolutely no chance to get new passes (and our flight was supposed to be dealt with after last passenger of Brussels one) in the next couple of hours, we decided to go to TAP transfer center located inside the airport. And there we found another very angry crowd of passengers from cancelled TAP flight to Paris with the whole transfer center being serviced by yet another 2 TAP employees only.
Not knowing whether transfer center of TAP will be wiling to deal with our issue, since we were told to be at gate 18 and having no way to come to the counter and ask, since the angry Frenchmen were telling us they already stand in the queue for 2 hours and they will rather die than allow us to go ahead and ask a question, we turned back to gate 18 where a major part of Brussels flight was still crowding-up around 2 TAP employees and people from our flight just standing around the Brussels crowd enjoying their time.
So, we just stood and waited there as well. About 22:00 it was a policeman (not anyone from TAP) who said that there is something definitely wrong here and passengers of our flight will have to stand the whole night at gate 18, if it will continue like this, so he made a call and in about 10 minutes 3 more TAP employees showed-up (where were they before?) and made a new announcement that passengers of our flight to Frankfurt should go back to gate 16 and they will deal with us there.
In the end it was a pure miracle that we actually made our connection next day. At first we were given boarding passes for the flight leaving Lisbon next day at 16:00 (this is, if it wasn't cancelled too), which was already later than our flight to Alaska was leaving from Frankfurt. But when standing in the crowd at gate 16 we started to communicate with a young couple, who they got boarding passes for 08:30 a.m. flight next day in Economy and agreed to swap with us. In the end we got boarding passes in row 28 in Economy class of this 08:30 a.m. flight. Next day when boarding it, TAP employee making the boarding suddenly gave my wife a boarding pass back into Business class (night before we were told everything is sold-out). When I asked about myself, I was told to speak with the crew after the boarding was finished. There was actually an empty seat in Business. When I asked crew member on board and explained her that I actually was supposed to fly Business according to my initial ticket, she told me "they can't make upgrades on board", so I flew to Frankfurt in row 28 near the toilet with Business class seat being empty.
Coming back to events in Lisbon, in the middle of the night, already standing in queue at the reception San Malhoa hotel in Lisbon where TAP was sending everyone to (the fact that an average size hotel could suddenly accommodate several hundred people from these cancelled flights in the hottest tourist season in Portugal just reconfirm the fact that all these "cancellations" were premeditated and planned long time ahead and TAP made an agreement with this hotel) I met some people from cancelled TAP flight to Berlin.
So, this day there were minimum 4 flights that TAP cancelled "due to technical reasons": ours to Frankfurt, Brussels, Paris and Berlin. These are only ones that I know of. Now the main question of it all: what could have happened? Could 4 flights break down at the same time? No. Then what? There were no strikes, the weather was excellent all over Europe and the volcanoes in Iceland were quiet.
A quick search in the Net brought me to some sites offering passengers assistance in getting compensations for cancelled and too delayed flights and I found out that day of August 3rd wasn't an extraordinary one. As it turns TAP was and still is cancelling several flights per day for a long period of time, months, if not years. Sometimes it is 2 flights in a certain day, sometimes it is 4 (like when we were supposed to fly), sometimes it is 8, on 20th of October they cancelled 20 and November 8th I counted 87 (!!!) flights both from Lisbon to EU destinations and back to Lisbon.
Thus they save on fuel, on payments to crews, on fees to airports abroad. And they have the rest of the flights, which do fly in reality, more packed. Turning into nightmare getting in and out of Lisbon for many thousands of passengers who paid their money to TAP.
And, of course, TAP pays no compensations to anyone, even though they are automatically bound to according to EU-legislation. "Technical reason" is not among ones lifting the responsibility of an airline to pay compensations for flight cancellations. On a scale they are doing it, the conversation is about millions and millions of euro. Not to mention that they do all the cancellations on their pure will and "technical reason" are just words having no actual meaning behind them.
I am sure TAP calls it "business optimization". While everywhere else in the world it is called dishonest business practices and people are going to prison for doing things like this.
