Letter of complaint (14 April 2018)
Justification
This letter of complaint was my homework for Practical language and I decided to use it here as an artefact, because, unlike in other writings I do, I got a feedback written by a teacher to this one, which is extremely helpful.
The letter (corrections in bold):
Dear Sir/Madam,
I am writing in connection with the “Board first” service provided by GreenAir airline and I am sorry to say that my family and I were extremely disappointed with it during our flight from Rome to Prague on 1 April 2018 (flight number ZX 1234).
When purchasing the ticket on your website, we were clearly informed that for the price of €20 per person, the above-mentioned service should provide us all with priority boarding and seating on the plane. However, the only priority boarding provided to us was the one to a transit bus which was to take us from the gate to the airplane. As the aforementioned bus was the only one in service that day, the rest of the passengers boarded it only minutes after we did, stood closer to the doors and therefore exited it first when it stopped at the designated place in front of the airplane and were able to board the plane immediately, minutes before we managed to reach the doors. Despite all of our efforts, we were among the last ones to come get on board of the plane. What is more, as the flight was fully booked and most of the seats were already taken, our family was not able to find seats together anymore, while the reason for purchasing the service was precisely that. Consequently, not only we paid did we pay €60 for the service in vain, it even proved to be exceptionally counterproductive because it placed us in an extremely unfavourable position in comparison to those who had not paid any extra money.
As you can surely imagine, we are all very disappointed and upset and I must insist on an immediate full refund of the price for the inadequate service. I also feel entitled to at least a partial refund of our ticket costs in addition to an apology for the discomfort we suffered. We would also like to urge you to investigate the matter further and ensure that the misleading advertisement is removed in order that such a disagreeable incident shall never happen to any of your customers again.
I hope that this matter can be resolved to our mutual satisfaction and I will not be forced to take any further action and escalate the issue to the Air Transport Users Council.
I would appreciate it if you could look into this matter as soon as possible.
Yours faithfully,
Zuzana S.
Reflection:
Writing the letter did not take very long which makes me even more happy with the overall positive feedback. I just have to read the instructions more carefully. When I was writing it for the first time, I had to condense it a lot, as I thought the expected length was 250 words. Just when I wanted to post it to the system, I realised that I had to almost double my work to meet the requirements and here came a bit tedious work to come up with more detail and extra adjectives and adverbs...
The final evaluation done by my teacher, Mrs Randall:
Points: 10/10
This is an excellent piece of work - you write very convincingly with some really nice vocabulary and the level of accuracy is very high...