You have booked a ticket on Peach Aviation (or Peach Airlines as we will call it) a month ago, to get you from Taipei, Taiwan to Okinawa, Japan.
You wake up, check your emails and make your way to the Taipei airport, which is approximately an hour outside of the city. Upon entering the airport you look at the departures board and notice that next to “Peach Airlines” is marked “Flight Cancelled”.
You head over to the ticket desk only to find a mob of people huddled around a gentleman who is pointing to a printed sign slapped to a post. It reads that the airline, due to scheduling issues, has canceled the only flight of the day to Okinawa.
You gain the attention of the gentleman. “What are my options?”.
“Refund or rebook tomorrow,” he states.
“What about my hotel costs? I have a non-refundable hotel booked for tonight that I won’t be able to get to”
“Sorry, Peach will only refund or rebook your airline ticket,” he replies.
“What if I need to get to Okinawa today,” you ask.
“Proceed to China Airlines desk and buy ticket”
“Will Peach Airlines refund me?”
“No, you incur cost.”
…
Essentially, you are now standing in an airport with a ticket that is totally worthless. Peach Airlines will not book you on another flight out today, they won’t re-route you nor put you on another airline’s flight to make things right. In fact, the gentleman answering questions doesn’t even work for Peach and there is no way for you to directly contact Peach.
Of course, because of all the displaced passengers, the Peach Airlines flights for the next couple days are now completely booked which means you are either stuck in Taiwan for multiple days or you need to incur costs in the $400 range by buying a last minute ticket on another airline.
Will Peach Airlines reimburse you for any of the trouble for which they are solely liable? No. Not even a possibility. They just don’t care. In fact, the gentleman explains to you that it is your fault because you bought a ticket on a low cost carrier and low cost carriers, he explains, are able to do this type of thing.
Because Taiwan and Japan allow airlines to do these sorts of things without any repercussions, the only advice one can give is to be very, very careful about booking low-cost carriers in these parts of the world. Furthermore, Peach Airlines should be avoided at all costs.
And the kicker? Per a review of Twitter, you note that they actually cancelled the flight yesterday and sent zero notification, no email, no phone call, nothing. Totally unacceptable.
Peach Airlines negligence has costs you hundreds of dollars and prevented you from seeing a remote island that you really wanted to see.
Peach Airlines should be avoided at all costs.
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5 Comments
Thanks for sharing this, but sorry about your experience, though it is very normal for Peach. So for all the reasons you mention (and more) I don’t recommend flying any LCCs to or from Japan, and I’m sorry to say that Peach are actually one of the better (well, less-bad) ones, since they will apparently refund you, if of course you can get hold of them.
I wonder if you would like to share this website, which explains more about LCCs from Japan, to warn your readers? Of course no problem either way – just thought I’d share.
japanlccs.com
Thanks for the reply Jesse along with the link to your efforts. Peach Air is a terrible operation for the problems they caused and how little they cared. Their negligence can ruin your vacation.
Thanks for your informative post! I almost booked Peach Airlines last month, but my gut feeling told me to pay a bit more and to fly with Asiana Airlines instead. Your article just confirmed my fears!
I’ve just experienced the same situation last night. Peach just simply notify us at the gate after waiting for the 2 hours delay already. With the negligence, we can’t talk with their own staff because they outsource the ground staff to do the check-in operation. So the staff just simply deny and say there are nothing they can do in this situation because they are not peach staff. Fortunately, i email to the booked hotel and explain the situation. They do a refund process for me at no cost at all. True nightmare airline, indeed.
Thanks for the note and sorry about the experience Wakin. Peach Airlines is awful! They should be put out of business for these kind of practices.