MAS scales down operations in light of travel ban

SEPANG: Malaysia Airlines (MAS) will significantly reduce its overall operations, in view of the nationwide movement control order (MCO) by the government for the period between March 18 and March 31.

International flights to India have been suspended until March 31, and the Philippines from Saturday (March 21) until March 31, following the respective governments’ ban on travel to or from Malaysia.

Prior to the MCO, MAS had suspended services to Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Beijing, Daxing and Kota Kinabalu-Shanghai, as well as reduced capacity to Australia and New Zealand due to self-isolation policy of the two countries.

MAS group chief executive officer Captain Izham Ismail said: “The situation has been rather fluid these past two days since we have had to make last-minute cancellations to abide by the restrictions.

"The uncoordinated approach has posed great challenges to our operations, but we are doing our best to re-route passengers via reallocation onto other carriers.

“This is an added cost to our operations. We are also adjusting our low- load flights by canceling and merging them to manage costs, while managing our customer expectations, ” he said in a statement.

To date, he said, that they had cancelled more than 4,000 flights.

“Our global contact centre has taken the brunt of this situation with the number of calls peaking at 25,000 daily and up to 2,000 emails daily in the past three weeks, ” he explained.

“We sincerely apologise to our passengers as we understand the situation is causing them anxiety concerning their bookings. I assure them that we are not here to take advantage of the situation.

"In fact, we are one of few airlines that have offered unlimited flexibility in travel date change and waiver of certain fees, ” he pointed out.

“It is just taking us a lot longer to process each request due to the volume of calls and emails. Changing bookings requires special expertise in the global booking system, therefore it takes time for us to redeploy staff to support our contact centre, ” he said.

He said that MAS’ ticket office in Nu Sentral was also closed from Friday (March 20), following the nationwide closure of malls.

“We are therefore encouraging passengers with bookings beyond the next 48 hours to initiate booking changes online via our Covid-19 waiver assistance form available on our website.

“Due to the significant capacity cut, Malaysia Airlines and all sister companies under the Malaysia Aviation Group’s back office operations have also been reduced alongside flight and airport operations.

A majority of its workforce around the world are working from home in line with various governments’ requirements to combat the spread of Covid-19.