PIA management needs to take some lessons in honesty before coming up with slogans like “spend Eid with loved ones”
KARACHI: PIA has offered a 30 per cent discount to travellers so that they are able to spend Eid with their loved ones, a commendable marketing initiative. But, would one really dare trust the national airline? One can’t imagine the agony a person has to go through in Ramazan when PIA delays flights and its agents vanish from departure lounges. One can understand a delay resulting from a technical fault or the weather. However, a delay due to PIA staff vanishing from the lounge, and a private contractor very foolishly asking you to show your boarding pass to collect a free sandwich and a paper cup half-full of tea is absurd.
Just a few days ago, one of my relatives had to stay at the Dubai airport for hours due to the PIA plane — which was supposed to take people home to ‘celebrate Eid with loved ones’ — developing a technical fault. Now such a thing can happen anywhere with any airline. But, imagine when I read a spokesperson’s comment in a newspaper saying that these delays were planned due to Ramazan timings, with passengers having been informed a week earlier. What a shameful lie. One should not be lying in Ramazan, at least! If the delay was planned, why were the passengers on that flight given a boarding pass? The first step to solving a problem is to realise that there is one. The PIA management needs to take some lessons in honesty before coming up with slogans like “spend Eid with loved ones”. Otherwise, they should just change the slogan to ‘spend Eid at the airport’.
Fareed A Siddiqui
Published in The Express Tribune, July 17th, 2015.
Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.
