After my blog post about Air Asia‘s treatment of its customers I received a email from the company telling me that the USD 3000 that they have been sitting on since January will be paid back to me in 30 to 60 working days! Worst case that means an additional 3 months of waiting to get my money back. Ain Izzaty, a customer support staff at Air Asia sent me the following explanation why it takes ‘some time’ to pay me back the money they owe me:

I will explain to you why it takes some time to process it. Once the agent place the queue for refund in the systems it will escalated to their manager on duty to verify and approve then the manager will escalate it to the finance department, and once finance department received the report they will check with our accounts department and then they will send the report to the bank. Kindly take note that Air Asia finance department is not based in Kuala Lumpur, its based in Thailand.

Bank will take some time to process it and transfer the fund to your bank, all this process normally takes 30 – 60 working days to process from the date your booking placed on refund queue excluding Saturdays and Sundays. The process get delayed sometimes if there is any problem between bank to bank transfer however the problem will be solved by the bank. We have escalated this matter to finance department to check with the bank and speed up the process. Thank you so much for your patience all this while, kindly check your credit card statement from time to time. We will email you the status once we get the reply from the finance department.

Thank you for flying with Air Asia.

Air Asia, this is total bullsh*t. I used to work for a multinational in finance and know exactly how these procedures work. They can be done in hours or maximum a few days, not months. Do you really think that it makes any difference that your finance department is in Thailand and not in Malaysia? Or do you transport your payment instructions by bicycle from Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok?

You are just delaying the payment as much as possible and the customer is obviously not important to you. I hoped the issue would be solved after the long phone call on Friday, but you’re only making it worse. I know you are a low-cost airline but that’s not a justification to treat your customers like dirt. Short-term thinking will hurt your long-term results. The end result is that you lost a customer and that I do not mind spreading the word about this.

During Chinese New Year my family and I had a holiday in Malaysia, and we took Air Asia for that trip. I was quite positive about the airlines (see also my blog post about the trip) and planned to use them again. That has changed in the mean time.

When I received my credit card statement in February I noticed that Air Asia charged me two times for the flights, instead of USD 3000 I paid them USD 6000. Looking back I should have immediately canceled the booking on my credit card, but I made the mistake of contacting the airline about it (or actually, my travel agent helped me and did this for me). They asked us to send them some materials to prove that there was a double payment and they would take care of it. After waiting for two weeks or so we did not hear anything, so we called them again. The reaction: we never received your email… What can you say? So we sent them the info once more, and this time they received it. When we again did not hear anything and informed what was going on, we were told we had to wait 30 working days to get a reply. I was very unhappy with this, but decided to play it nice and wait.

Of course after 30 days still no answer from Air Asia, so our travel agent called them again. This time the answer was that they get hundreds of emails and that we would have to wait for an additional 30 working days starting April 17. The travel agent asked me what she should do, and I decided to make a phone call myself.

Customer support employee Mr. Loong Jian had the bad luck to get me on the phone. I calmly explained the situation and demanded to get the money back immediately. They had been sitting on USD 3000 that belongs to me for over 3 months, and I told him that I do not accept any more excuses and want the full amount back straight away. He apologized a couple of times and said he would look into it. He put me on hold for a while and then told me that finance was processing it now, and that I had to wait and check next month’s credit card statement.

I repeated that I did not want to wait anymore, I had been waiting for way too long already without any communication from their side. I asked to get a written confirmation either by email or fax that the money would be on its way to me. He could not give that to me he said, so I asked to speak to his manager. Loong Jian told me that he was not sure if a manager was available but I insisted. So he put me on hold for over 5 minutes, but when the music finally stopped he was back on the line. There was no manager available to speak to me is what he told me…

Now I was really getting pissed, and I made that very clear to him. This is not the way you treat your customers! I told him I would not hang up until I would be able to speak to a manager. He probably thought I was bluffing but soon found out I had no intention to hang up, I had been waiting long enough. Then he said that he would end the conversation from his side. I could not believe what I heard – he wanted to hang up on me! I know a thing or two about call centers, and they do not like it if customers ask for managers. But I also know there is always a manager available in case things escalate. So I told him that hanging up on me would only make the situation more difficult, and that I would also make trouble for him. He then said he would put me on hold again, which I did not agree to. He solved that one in a nice way by putting me on mute! Well, at least I did not have to listen to the stupid music anymore.

My strategy worked, because eventually (after another 5 to 10 minutes) I got his team leader on the phone, Ms. Lee SC. She had received better training than her employees, and with her I was able to come to a solution soon. She promised that they would send my travel agent a written confirmation today that the money would be wired back to me. That’s what I was looking for, now let’s hope that Air Asia will keep its word and that the USD 3000 will be back in my account soon. Too bad the whole thing cost me 40 minutes, but without it I may have never received the money.

I Twittered about it while on the phone and also copied Air Asia’s Twitter account (@airasiablog) on it a few times. No reaction from them so far, it will be interesting to see how good they are at using Web 2.0 and reacting to clients. Their customers support certainly s*cks, and they clearly did not invest in training their call center staff. I’ve had it with Air Asia and likely won’t use them anymore. If a company does not treat its customers with respect they don’t deserve my money.

Update: Air Asia sent me an email that I will have to wait another 30-60 working days before I can get my money back (see my blog post about this). That theoretically might mean another 3 months of waiting for my money! Air Asia may be a low cost airline (one reason why I tried them out), but if this is the way they treat their customers in order to keep costs low they won’t see me back. Next time I will fly Malaysia Airlines again to Kuala Lumpur.

Until next Tuesday the Shanghai Autoshow takes place again, and of course I visited this year as well. I say of course, because I worked for 7 years in the automotive industry (for Daimler/Mercedes-Benz) and that is what brought me to China. I even used to write columns for Dutch car magazine Autovisie about the Chinese automotive industry (I stopped doing that about a year ago).

I was lucky to get trade visitors tickets to the show (thanks to BMW China), so I did not have to go during the extremely busy public days. I went with some people from Tudou, who had journalist passes. Tudou is an official media (I never realized that actually) and has its own teams at the Autoshow that produce original content for our car channel at http://auto.tudou.com/. If you want to see some footage of the show, that is a good place to go.

The exhibition has changed a lot over the years, from a small not-too-important auto show it is now among the most important in the world. It is huge: you need hours to just walk around the whole place to see all the models. Because I did not have that much time, I only went to the most important or interesting brands. For me those are mainly the Chinese brands: outside China people laugh about them (well, also still some people inside China do this) but they have come a long way and I think the next General Motors will come from China. The name of that company? Likely Chery, but also BYD and Geely stand a chance. One of these brands will first build out their business in China and then conquer the rest of the world.

Their quality may not be up too Western standards yet, but that will eventually come. Or maybe some people won’t care that much about extremely high standards when you can get a good car for maximum half the price of a Western model. Their designs are so much better than just 2-3 years ago, it amazes me how quickly these companies improve and innovate. Look at BYD for example, this company started in 2003 (yes, that’s less than 6 years ago – before that they made batteries) and is now already one of the top players in the electric vehicle segment. Their F6 model (a mid-size sedan) can be recharged up to 70% in just 10 minutes time!

Chinese car companies also like to copy designs, and Geely did once again an excellent job at that during this show. After copying Mercedes-Benz models for many years they now decided to go one step higher and copy a Rolls-Royce front. Decide for yourself if they did a good job. The car has one major innovation, however: the back seat consists of just one huge emperor-like seat! I don’t think that will sell well in Western markets, but I am sure many Chinese bosses outside the tier 1 cities would love to show off being driven around in this car.

The excellent Danwei blog today has one of these only-in-China stories: A Beijing real estate developer decided to boost its sales by encouraging buyers to date its sales girls. If a couple gets married they receive a RMB 60,000 wedding present. The deal for the girls is that they not only get an 8% commission but can also find a wealthy husband. But there is probably more to the story as Danwei points out:

A local Real Estate executive I spoke to pointed out that the girls on offer are not that attractive. His theory is that the developer is not making money on selling apartments and so it signed a deal with a matchmaking agency to marry these “unwanted” girls to rich husbands. In return, the developer will receive much more than RMB 60,000 for every girl they manage to “give away”. This way, the girls don’t lose face by putting themselves on sale, the husbands don’t lose face by going directly to an agency to look for a bride, and the developer makes a nice profit. In a country with too many apartments and not enough girls, this doesn’t sound like a bad idea.

Read the whole story here and check out some of the available sales girls here.

When I wrote my blog post yesterday about the 2009 Tudou Video Festival I did not include any video footage of the award ceremony yet. Today I looked for and found a couple of short festival video’s on Tudou. This one gives a short impression of the festival, this one was shot before the festival started and this one gives a 5 minute overview of the award ceremony, including some of the speeches.

If you want to see some pictures, I created a set of some of my own (and of a few of Tudou CTO Michael Zhao’s) pictures here. Some more festival pictures, taken by Flickr user Dexteryy, can be found here.

There were also tons of articles in the Chinese press, see among others here, here, here and here.

This weekend the 2nd edition of the Tudou Video Festival took place in Shanghai. Compared to last year’s event, this year’s edition was a lot bigger and produced very professionally. Last year’s event in an old church high up in the mountains in Moganshan was great, but it still had a start-up feeling. The 2nd edition felt almost like the Oscars, something the presenter (Hu Yi Hu from Phoenix TV) also said.

Awards were handed out in 16 categories during the night. In total there had been 2000 video submissions and 5 million people voted online for the videos. During awards night an audience of 1000 people attended the ceremony, among others famous actors and presenters, government officials, business people, venture capitalists and film directors. The event was streamed live on Tudou as well and several TV camera’s recorded the whole evening. Winners not only received the Tudou Video Award, but also a BenQ 42″ plasma TV, a notebook computer and a desktop computer (thanks for sponsoring BenQ!).

I enjoyed the evening very much and was once again surprised by the high level of creativity. User generated content can compete with professionally produced content, that’s what this evening proved to me. Several of the selected directors will get the chance to work with the China Film Group. Who knows, maybe the next Zhang Yimou was among our winners last night!

If you want to see some of the winning films on Tudou, you can see all of them here. The categories are all in Chinese, but if you mouse over them you will see the English name in the link.

In the location of the former Sens & Bund a new restaurant opened its doors last week: Mr. & Mrs. Bund. When I read that Paul Pairet is the chef I knew I had to try the place as soon as possible: Mr. Pairet is the former chef at Jade on 36, in my opinion one of the best restaurants in the world. I loved his new creations and amazing taste combinations there, so I was looking forward to try out his new place.

I was therefore happy that we managed to get a reservation last night, especially in one of the busiest weekends of the year – Formula One is in town. We arrived quite early, straight out of the office around 7:30 pm, and the place was still quite empty so we were seated at the window (as requested while making the reservation). The place filled up quickly and by 8:30 most tables in the front part were full with diners. A good mix of foreigners and Chinese, all looking forward to try this new restaurant.

Mr. & Mrs. Bund calls itself a Modern Eatery. And that’s a good description, it’s a mixture of traditional French with a modern global sauce and a big wink to make it not too serious. It already starts at the entrance where the door is now a painted wooden door, like the entrance of a regular restaurant in France. But when you enter you realize the place is not a regular restaurant, it’s huge: on the front and on the sides tables for dining and in the middle a big communal table. The back has a bar and behind the bar is the kitchen. The kitchen has windows, so you can follow exactly what the cooks are doing. The waiters and waitresses wear outfits that are semi-French: French looking but with some added touches to make them almost clownesque – e.g. all waiters seem to wear colorful Converse All-Stars! The atmosphere is very relaxed but still high-class.

The menu itself is probably the biggest I have ever seen. Not only the size, but especially the contents. There are literally hundreds of dishes on it, and everything can be served in different sizes, different ways of cooking and with different sauces. Almost overwhelming, especially when you are like me and would like to try out everything. Just like my favorite restaurant M1NT, Mr. & Mrs. Bund also use the Chinese way of serving food: everything is put in the middle and you can share the dishes. However, they ask you in advance, so if you prefer your own dish that’s also fine.

We started with champagne, their house champagne is excellent and when you ask for a second glass they will give you a new glass instead of filling it up again. Among others we tried foie gras (my standard dish in any restaurant, if it’s on the menu I normally order it), tomato and buffalo salad, huge asparagus (from Yunnan) with Hollandaise sauce, king prawns and Australian beef tenderloin with Bearnaise sauce. The food was in one word excellent. Not as extreme or avant-garde as Jade on 36 was (for some people that was too much, I loved it though), but more regular looking but with some of the same taste sensations. Because you can decide the size of your portions you can take several smaller portions to try more dishes.

The same is true for the wines: the restaurant has 32 wines available that are served in sizes from 4 cl upward, so you can try as many as you like. They have a special Enomatic wine serving machine for these wines, to ensure that they stay well also after opening. They have some excellent wines available per glass, even a 1994 Chateau Petrus (not cheap of course, starting at RMB 1616 for 4 cl of this heavenly red wine). So if you just want to try a few different top wines this is a good place to go. I did not even look at the wine list because of the per glass selection, so I cannot say anything about it here, but I assume there will be some excellent wines on there as well.

I was very impressed by this first visit and will certainly be back soon. The atmosphere is very relaxed, you feel at ease in the restaurant the moment you enter. The service is great, even though the place just opened a week ago. When the head waiter looked at our order he came to our table and advised us to take one salad less because their portions are quite big. I think that’s just excellent. Also when we left we forgot that we had coats, but the waiting staff reminded us at the door. Small things like this often make the difference between a good and an excellent restaurant. If you like high-end food is a nice atmosphere I can only recommend this place. Even the prices are very reasonable for this kind of top restaurant, including some good wines (but no Petrus!) we paid about RMB 1500 for our dinner experience.

Mr. & Mrs. Bund, 6/F, Bund 18 (close to Nanjing Road), reservations: 021-6323 9898 Open 7 days a week, dinner only

This sign in the toilets in Spil Games Asia’s office building makes me smile every time I see it. It is not meant as an inspiration for the cleaning ladies to keep on working hard, but it actually just asks you to keep the toilet clean.