With regards to the letter AirAsia operations legal? kindly allow me too to relate a similarly bad experience with AirAsia.

About a month ago, I made a trip to Medan on AirAsia on a return ticket based on confirmed booking ie, scheduled and paid for well in advance. A couple of days before my flight to Medan (it was a weekend) I was informed that the return flight (on one of their twice daily flights) was cancelled.

I was offered a seat on the flight the following day at no additional cost or on other flight that day. I was put in a dilemma. I couldn't take an earlier flight back from Medan (a day earlier) without having to cancel an appointment in Medan.

Nor could I take the next day's flight without missing an afternoon meeting in KL with a client who was due to leave for overseas early the next morning. As a result I had to cancel one business meeting - a meeting that took a long time to set up and with possibly a business opportunity lost.

Note - being caught with AirAsia's 'change of plan' over the weekend, I couldn't inform the clients I needed to in time. Even if I could have, their schedule/travel plans had already been put in motion. It is not easy to coordinate with multiple parties when last minute changes are made.

It is not so much the cost of an AirAsia ticket (or their cost of rescheduling or the cost of an extra night/day being stuck in Medan) that bothers me so. It is that I now cannot plan a trip because of AirAsia's cavalier manner in cancelling flights and changing travel times of flights for which they have sold ticket for.

AirAsia should note that not only are the seats on their planes perishable, but so is my time, the value of my time and the opportunity cost of my time and that of the company I work for.

And not only my time. To set up these meetings took a lot of coordination, overseas phone calls with clients, rearranging of their schedules etc. AirAsia also wasted their time. But I am the one looking bad to them.

And all it took for AirAsia to screw it all up was a phone call saying that they have cancelled my flight and I am welcome to fly the next day (not even an offer to pay for your hotel and meals that night). And since they charge us to reschedule, can we similarly charge AirAsia a penalty?

A confirmed ticket is a confirmed ticket (paid for and transacted for). It is an agreement to take me from point A to point B at an agreed price at an agreed time. AirAsia, don't treat this lightly or your customers shabbily.

My only regret was that I took out my frustration on AirAsia staff on the ground at Medan's Polonia airport when I changed my ticket schedule (for the third time and paid for accordingly). These people were really not to blame. I'm sure it didn't look good to the other passengers who were around then.

If my taking the trouble to write this results in greater accountability by AirAsia towards its customers, maybe some good can be got out of this very costly (to me) foul-up.