Singapore Airlines says sorry for dodgy site

The CEO of Singapore Airlines, Goh Choon Phong, has issued a signed letter to customers apologising for the company's troubled website overhaul last month.

Singapore Airlines apology email
(Screenshot by Luke Hopewell/ZDNet Australia)

The problems started when the airline overhauled its website in May, with customers taking to online forum Whirlpool to vent their frustrations.

Users reported timeouts, credit card rejections, seating system glitches and booking problems.

One Whirlpool user said that the new site was "horrible and messy", while another said that the bad experience had driven them to book with another airline, saving money in the process.

"This is driving me nuts. I've been trying to search flights all morning but it keeps timing out on me. Why couldn't they have just kept the damn old website?", said one user.

To try and quell the customer riot, Singapore Airlines' CEO Goh Choon Phong today issued an apology for the dodgy revamp.

"On behalf of Singapore Airlines, I would like to offer our sincere apology for the inconvenience caused as a result of issues that arose from the launch of our new website on 22 May 2011," Phong said today in an email.

"As with all new initiatives that we undertake, the intention behind the website revamp was to improve on our customers' experience with us. I am truly sorry that the new website, with its technical problems, has instead caused much aggravation for many of our customers. We make no excuses for our failure to deliver an acceptable level of online service."

The Singapore Airlines CEO said that the company will be opening an investigation into the problematic website revamp and continues to work on the existing defects.

"An in-depth investigation as to how the issues that arose went undetected is well underway, and we are treating this with utmost importance," he said.

(Front page image credit: Singapore Airlines image by planegeezer, CC2.0)