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Ibom Air has a wonderful beneficiary program for its staff, especially the air hosts and hostesses that allows their relatives fly at a highly subsidized rate. At employment, a staff is given an opportunity to present five names that would benefit from this gesture. Each year they are given an opportunity to review the names. Now imagine if all the beneficiaries decided to travel all at once, would Ibom Air be making it’s required profit? It could be argued that there was no way all the beneficiaries would travel all at once, but such a hypothetical situation should also form the basis of policy review and implementation.
When my cousin put my name on her list of beneficiaries, I never tried to use it even though I had flown severally to Abuja after that. I am by nature skeptical of free or almost free programs in Nigeria because culturally we don’t seem to have it innate in us to treat others with dignity except they are highly placed or well resourced. My cousin informed me that she had repeated my name and asked me to just try it. Since I was going to travel abroad and decided to save some money, I decided to try it, against my best judgement. I gave my dates of travel and a PNR was generated for me which I used and made payment a few days later. I was surprised at how cheap the ticket was, under twenty thousand naira for a return ticket valued at nearly one hundred and fifty thousand naira! My gut told me it was too good to be true. I thank God that I had given myself a space of two days to spend in Abuja before traveling out otherwise I would have had to adjust the date of my international travel, with heavy costs.
My first shock was being asked to wait when I arrived at the check-in counter. I arrived quite early. The check-in counter lady had a smirk on her face and I could hear her tell her colleague “It’s this beneficiary people!” My heart sank. Was I being seen as beggarly? I stepped aside and waited. I went back half an hour later as she had instructed and she still asked me to wait, that the flight was fully booked, that I should come again towards the actual flight time. At this point I was ready for the worst. I wasn’t surprised therefore when she handed back my ID which she has collected, and told me “Sorry Sir, there is no space.” I thanked her and carried my bags away. Luckily I had asked the volunteers in my parish who had driven my car to drop me off to wait.
The worst thing was that when I called a staff in my former organization to book a ticket for me, she returned with the feedback that Ibom Air platform showed that there was no seat available for the next day. Air Peace usually doesn’t schedule flights for Tuesday from Calabar! And CallyAir was no where to be found! If I didn’t leave the next day, it meant I would fly into Abuja and straight to the international airport, the day of my international travel! And if I didn’t still get a ticket, I would have to adjust my international ticket because I could never travel by road to Abuja! She called me a few moments later and advised me to speak to the logistics manager in my former organization as he had a way with airlines. I was relieved when my former logistics manager gave me assurances that he would get me a seat even when the platform displayed unavailability. Finally, I was able to secure a seat on Ibom Air for ninety-nine thousand naira.
As soon as I presented my ID the next day, I was checked in, because I had purchased a ticket! I didn’t bother again with the beneficiary ticket. No one asked me about it either. This experience has driven me to make the following observations: For one, I think the number of beneficiaries per air host or hostess is too high. I was chatting with a parishioner who is a staff of Air Peace and she told me that Air Peace only gives two tickets per year to staff, not even their beneficiaries. Perhaps Ibom Air should limit theirs to two? Or is the high number probably because management doesn’t take the program seriously anyway? It seems to be the equivalent of those who were given concessions in the era of night-traveling luxurious buses, to squat in the middle aisle after a lot of haggling.
The terms and conditions are such that a seat is only available if there is no full-paying passenger, which means that even if your trip was approved days before, you could be supplanted by someone that brought full payment at the last minute! This doesn’t give any dignity to the beneficiary passenger. Perhaps a way out is to ensure that approval is not given to a beneficiary if travel on said date is not guaranteed. Ibom Air could also ensure that certain days which are customarily busy, such as Sundays, Mondays and Fridays, are removed from beneficiary itinerary.
Once a PNR is generated for a beneficiary’s trip and payment is made, I suggest that the ticket be treated like any other ticket, with dignity. It is humiliating to go to the airport and wait till all the other passengers have checked in before you are told that there is no seat for you. Assuming one had banked all their hopes on that trip and had no resources to fund a fresh ticket, then Ibom Air would have generated bad will. We should never underestimate the effect of goodwill on any enterprise.
The joy we generate in people because they have enjoyed our services, and the pain we generate in people because of the way we have treated them can add to our success or failure. Above all, in our policies, we should take care not to treat human beings as dispensable. Even a beggar should be treated with respect because everyone carries in them the image and likeness of God.