Trying to turn around its battered image and diverting attention away from viral images of its flights looking empty and woefully underbooked, Malaysia Airlines (MAS) has taken to offering hugely discounted flights and even giving away free tickets to customers in Australia and New Zealand.
A report by News.com.au details MAS’s slashed prices for a return economy class ticket from Australia to Kuala Lumpur, starting from AUD495 (RM1460), and a weekend deal from Australia to Kota Kinabalu from AUD557 (RM1643) – both sizable discounts for Aussie travellers planning a vacation in Malaysia.
MAS is even offering 12 free return flights from Australia and New Zealand to KL as part of a competition … and this is where it gets a bit awkward.
The competition MAS has organised is called “My Ultimate Bucket List”.
On the surface, it sounds innocuous enough, until you stop and consider for a moment what a “bucket list” implies: it’s a list of things you’d like to do before you “kick the bucket” – die.
Not exactly the best mental imagery to conjure up by an airline which saw 239 people on board Flight MH370 vanish without a trace, and are presumed dead, in March, and another 298 people perish in the shooting down of Flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine on July 17.
Not to drive the point home, but yeah: Malaysia Airlines is offering 12 free tickets on its flights to help customers go do the things they’d most like to do before they die. Just, hopefully, not on those aforementioned flights.
These promotions, of course, are aimed at helping to rehabilitate MAS’s image in the public eye, especially since it’s in the process of being delisted and made fully private by the Federal Government’s investment arm Khazanah Nasional Bhd (Khazanah), at a cost of a RM1.4 billion share buyout and a possible gutting of 6,000 jobs, more than 25% of its current stable of 20,000 employees.
Such initiatives to generate a little goodwill and get the public (and the internet) back on its side is a great idea, but MAS naming a competition for free tickets “My Ultimate Bucket List” is awkward to say the least, and tonedeaf and self-defeating at worst.
See Also:
Malaysia Airlines’ restructuring might see 6,000 people losing their jobs
MAS employees have been quitting, even before planned layoffs
Malaysia Airlines is losing RM6.7 million per day, Mashable says
