Hey Eva Airways,
I hope you realize you have lost a valuable customer in me and my family members, whom make 2 or 3 annual trips between Vancouver and Taiwan.
Our most recent experience went as such. We had a family emergency and bought 2 last minute round trip "Premium Economy" tickets at $1700 a piece over the counter at YVR. There were no other seats available except for "Premium Economy," so we settled due to the urgency. Unfortunately, the return flight date we wanted was fully booked at the time so the service agent requested 2 seats for us for that day and told us to call EVA Airways to confirm.
A couple days after arriving in Taiwan, we had a chance to look into confirming our return flights. First, we checked online ourselves and we're denied access to change or alter our bookings. Then we asked our travel agent, but he was also unable to do anything because the tickets were issued by EVA Airways. This meant we were at the mercy of the EVA Airways customer service hotline, oh yay...
Our first couple of attempts led to 10 plus minutes of waiting with no answers. So then we decided to go to the EVA Airways Office directly in Taiwan since luckily we lived close by. We were told there were no seats available for the dates we requested except for business class. These tickets would require us to pay the difference which would basically buy a whole other ticket. Not exactly what we wanted to hear, so we decided to put ourselves on the waiting list.
We considered many options, factoring time and cost, choices included:
#1) upgrading to business class seats for basically $3,000 each (big no no)
#2) a "Premium Economy" class seat but with a different pay grade, pay $685 difference (don't know why?)
#3) refund the return flight difference and buy one way tickets with other airlines (too much time spent transferring plus money paid would be about equal)
#4) lastly, the wait and see game, IF there are seats available we would be notified, but still AT A COST!
Long story short, in total, we talked to 10 plus different customer service agents across 2 different continents. Not once were we transfered to a manager and we weren't exactly speaking politely. Every time we got through to an agent we basically had to explain our situation again.
Our end result was we were able to get on the flight requested with 1 ticket at the cost of $685 extra to be upgraded from "Premium Economy" to "Premium Economy." The other ticket was downgraded from "Premium Economy" to economy with no return on the fare difference.
Not only did we spend a lot more money then the average customer on a flight between Vancouver to Taiwan. We also wasted a lot of time and energy calling, talking and agruing with EVA Airways.
Suffice it to say, a difficult and complicated customer service experience and we will most certainly be looking for other options in to the future. Thanks but no thanks EVA Airways.