Malaysia Airlines scales down operations, over 4,000 flights cancelled

KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia Airlines Bhd (MAB) is scaling down its overall network (flights) effective today, following the government’s nationwide Movement Control Order (MCO) until March 31, 2020.

The national carrier said international flights to India were also suspended between March 17, 2020 to March 31, 2020, followed by Philippines from March 21, 2020 to March 31, 2020 due to respective governments’ ban on travel to/from Malaysia.

MAB has also suspended services to Saudi Arabia, South Korea as well as Beijing Daxing and Kota Kinabalu to Shanghai due to border controls imposed and reduced capacity to Australia and New Zealand resulted from self-isolation policy of the two countries.

MAB group chief executive officer Captain Izham Ismail said the situation has been rather fluid these past two days, citing that the airline 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, although it has added cost to our operations,” he said in a statement today.

He said MAB would also adjust its low-load flights by cancelling and merging them to manage costs while managing our customer expectations.

“To date we have cancelled more than 4,000 flights. Our global contact centre has been at the brunt of this situation with number of calls peaking at 25,000 daily and up to 2,000 emails daily in the past three weeks,” he added.

MAB had also offered unlimited flexibility in travel date change and waiver of certain fees.

However, the current situation would take longer time 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.

MAB’s ticket office in Nu Sentral is also closed today 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,” he said.

MAB parent company, Malaysia Aviation Group’s back office operations have also been reduced alongside flight and airport operations.

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

“The group ensures though that it continues to uphold the highest safety standards in its entire operations.”

Source: NST