Let’s start with the terminal. It’s actually more of a cage. While other airlines are housed in a nice building at Melbourne’s Tullamarine, the one with all the sleek, integrated, shiny systems and extras of modern airports (escalators, good shops, choice of cafes), the Tiger terminal is like a carbuncle on the airport’s body, an ugly protrusion.
Taxi drivers have to loop around to find it, you have to walk through a semi-construction area to get there from the SkyBus, and once you arrive – gloom descends.
Constructed like a temporary shelter, the Tiger terminal, which has now BEEN THERE FOR YEARS, has never lost its makeshift air. Each time I arrive I expect that the Tiger Cage would have been dismantled, FINALLY, and a proper building put in it’s place.
Yet there it is, the sad carpet of an unrenovated Centrelink, the banks of check-in counters that inspire a special feeling of dread (what if I am not checked in 45 minutes beforehand? What if my luggage is 50 grams overweight? What if – as happened to me last year, I booked a ticket and accidentally put my first name as my last name and wasn’t allowed on the flight until I had purchased another ticket?), and the large ratio of crying children to non-crying passengers.
Get there and checked-in within 45 minutes and you have crossed one hurdle. But then there is the cabin baggage challenge.
It’s strict. I’ve scrambled at the check in counter, making the difficult decision about what books or clothes to throw in the bin. I’ve also worn the contents of my suitcase – skirts over trousers, three jumpers, scarfs wrapped in my hair, around my neck, my waist, my arms. But the triumph of waddling through the security check and explosives test and murmuring “dat’ll show the man” is fleeting when the monitor shows that your flight has been cancelled or delayed.
My colleague Michael Safi, who is also a duel Melbourne/Sydney citizen, says of Tiger: “Even its Melbourne terminal evokes the airline’s cheap as chips ethos, providing the bare minimum required of a building, which is to say, shelter.
“On the ground, workers manning the Tiger desks wear no identifying insignia, as if part of some airline staff witness protection program.”
On and on, he moans: “Its website is the online equivalent of bargaining with a dodgy mechanic; only intense concentration will spare you from paying for dubious privileges like boarding minutes early ($TK) or choosing a seat ($TK). Paying with anything other than a Debit Mastercard? That’ll be $8.50.”
I fly a lot and Tiger – particularly if you book in advance – is one of the lowest cost airlines operating in Australia. To get from Melbourne to Sydney for sometimes as low as $39 can seem worth the drab aesthetics of the Tiger cage or the occasional cancellations.
But I am not the only one who has a complicated relationship with Tiger Air.
This week Tigerair was declared – for a third year in a row – Australia’s worst-performing airline by a government-appointed ombudsman.
The Airline Customer Advocate’s report received 47.1 claims for refund for each million customers Tiger carried in 2014 (it carried 3.3 million in 2014). There was 11.1 complaints for Jetstar, 7.5 for Virgin and 4.4 for Qantas. Rex, the regional airline scored the lowest at 2.8.
According to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald, Tiger also received the most complaints about flight delays or cancellations, unexpected fees and charges, poor customer service and unfair terms and conditions.
A spokeswoman for Tiger said its poor on time performance was as a result of “airport infrastructure limitations” and “flight network changes”.
With such damning results, will it dissuade me or my colleague Michael Safi from flying again? No.
“My inner cheapskate will win out every time,” says a cost-conscious Safi.
Me too. When I am booking my flight from the calm of home, the realities of life in the Tiger Cage seem far away.
Then stuck in there, waiting for a flight, drinking a burnt latte, I’ll vow NEVER AGAIN ... but like a sucker for punishment, I keep coming back for more.
