Alvin Jimenez

Probably the closest thing to a Black Friday sale this side of the world, Philippine Airlines’ “The Real Deal” sale gives people the chance to purchase tickets online to all major destinations at almost 1/3 of their normal cost. My fiancee was able to purchase her one way ticket to San Francisco for only $336, including taxes. The operative word in all of this is of course — the word “online”.

Let me tell you about the painstakingly difficult process we had to go through from April 27th to 28th.

Beforehand, we already knew it would be hard to get a transaction through, so I called Philippine Airlines’ 24-hour hotline to ask if it was possible to book on the phone, and pay for the ticket somewhere else. True enough, this “Real Deal” promo really was limited to online credit card purchases. I didn’t worry as much, because I didn’t think people would wait until 12 midnight.

Boy was I wrong.

As soon as 12 midnight hit, the simple ticket search on the Philippine Airlines’ Real Deal page was no longer loading. I clicked and refreshed the hell out of my browser, and nothing came out. On one of our sessions, we managed to get to the payment page, only to time out on the last confirmation page before the completion of the transaction. Oh, the frustration. Since the site had an error message telling us to not click on the submit button again (at the risk of charging the credit card twice), we were forced to email their customer service people to determine if the transaction went through. You can just imagine that we were probably one of the thousands who were doing the exact very same thing, at that same moment.

We decided to make the extra effort and call their 24-hour hotline. I am not kidding when I say this, but it took me probably close to a hundred redials just to get through (and that’s not counting the 30-minute wait before an operator finally picked up). What did the person on the other line tell me? That the transaction didn’t go through and that we should enter our credit card information again. Pffft. It was already 5am. I knew it was time to call it a night morning.

On around 10am of the same day, we decided to hold off on any more tries to purchase the ticket. By then, the email I was asked to send ask for confirmation of the purchase still didn’t have a reply, and I had already reached my yearly quota of busy signals and please try again laters. We had a few errands to run, so we ended up putting off the chase for a few hours.

While I was out, and since there was no hope getting through the local line, my fiancee decided to user her Yahoo voice account to call the Philippine Airlines 1-800 number. She waited for around 25 minutes, but at least she got through. It was then they told her that one of the purchases we were trying so hard to push for, had in fact gone through. Whew. After literally more than 24 hours of online frustration, this Philippine Airlines Real Deal promo finally decided to give us an effin’ break.

One ticket down, and another one to go.

By 12 midnight, I was again trying to access their site because I wanted to purchase a different ticket — this time for myself. This is what greeted me.

At that point, I told myself that I wasn’t going to subject myself to the same crap all over again. Also, I had something important to take care of in the morning. And so when I got to the office, I decided to try one more time.

Believe it or not, I made it to the last step. After the payment went through, I decided to call Philippine Airlines’ 1-800 number and they said they were just waiting for feedback from the bank. I sure hope all this trouble was worth it.

*Updated: An officemate sent me this following email. She received it from Philippine Airlines this morning.

Isn’t this what I tried to do in the first place?