Atrocious levels of incompetence and general disregard for service! at O.R. Tambo Airport

The parking management take 40 min to release you from their known faulty parking bay ticket system!

On Wednesday the 10th of October 2012, after paying for my parking ticket and driving out to the exit bay on level 1, I inserted my ticket in their console, which proceeded to reply with “Please wait”… which is fine… but then it stays like that for 5 minutes before telling me to “call for help” no parking or security attendants are anywhere to be seen (a common problem I learned later) so I pressed the ‘help’ button… nothing…. I pressed it again a few times over the next couple minutes… no response.

5 min

I then get out of my car, trying to look around for any official personnel to assist… not a soul in sight. Thankfully a good samaritan by the name of Greg saw me and came over telling me that this is a common occurrence at O.R. Tambo and that it’s been going on for ages but nobody seems to be fixing or doing anything about it, he himself has gone through this a few times before, so knows where the Parking Management Office is (I would never have found it, there are no signs whatsoever to get there).

15 min

Now enters the utter displeasure of dealing with Solmina (phonetic spelling), wow, I have never seen someone so utterly disinterested in her job or in any resemblance of service… no, seriously wow! This woman is the only person working in the office and seems barely half awake. After explaining the situation she calls someone to go to the parking bay to help, and tell us that the person is there waiting for us. Great progress, we go down stairs again back to the car and…. not soul in sight…. for the next 10 minutes… nothing… we go below see if there is anyone in the level below… no-one. So we go back to the car, maybe someone arrived while we went looking. They didn’t appear, but thankfully two new good samaritans pitched up by the names of Frans and Lucky who both work for ACSA and were also appalled at the pathetic service.

30 min

Lucky came with Greg and I to once again go up two floors to the Parking Management Office and find out from Solmina what was going on and why no one was assisting. Lucky spoke to her, she kept trying any other avenue of action than do something but Lucky was insistent on her finding a solution, finally she called someone by the name of ‘Christina’ to go to the parking bays and assist us, at this point I’m rather frustrated and ask her to validate that this Christina is at the parking exit right now and that when we walk all the way back down she will be there waiting, to which she replies that Christina is there already. So we go back down… shockingly…. not a soul, so we wait, again. Then Frans has the idea to try use the other bay ticket consoles to try communicate, thankfully after a couple of times pressing on the ‘help’ button on the far console someone answers (first you wait while an answering machine message tells you that ‘someone will attend to you shortly’). You wouldn’t guess who finally answers the console, Christina, the one who was meant to be standing in front of us. After a couple of minutes of negotiation with Lucky who was also exacerbated by her excuses she finally lifted the boom, (well first the wrong ones, even though explained numerous times it was the far right bay) and there was ESCAPE!!! so quickly I drove out.

40 min

I thanked the awesome collection of samaritans Greg, Lucky and Frans and took my mother back to her home, did I mention she’d just finished near 24 hours of travel before being rudely shown the ever so inviting service of O.R. Tambo Airport.