Orange France: YOU SUCK

I, candidly, called Orange France Customer Service this morning in order to activate one of their Data Roaming Plans. As usual, the plan I chose ended up being activated right away although I had asked to activate it on a specific date. Upon my second call to fix this, I was promised everything would be taken care of, only to realize later on that the person I talked to had done nothing. My last contact with them resulted in Orange telling that due to the fact that they had made a mistake, my Data Roaming Plan could not and would not be activated at the date that I originally asked. That's it. No apologies and no attempt to fix their original mistake.

Bouygues Telecom France Prepaid iPad Data Plan: #Fail

The French mobile carrier rumored to have the best customer service offers an iPad specific prepaid data plan. You can get unlimited data for a day for €6 and unlimited data for a month for €29.90. The only problem is that their tutorial on how to create an account after purchasing an iPad specific sim card is erroneous at best. Once you have purchased and installed their micro-sim card in your iPad, Bouygues Telecom instructs you to download their iPad app from the App Store although there is no iPad specific Bouygues Telecom app there. There's an iPhone specific app but it is not functional.

The €9.90 sim card gives you 2 days of unlimited data. After that, you'll have to create an account using Safari (as their iPhone app does not exist): any url entered in Safari when connected to the cellular network will direct you to the carrier specific page in order to create an account. The only problem is that it fails every time you attempt to do so. So, you're basically stuck calling their 1034 line where, apparently, nobody has heard of their iPad specific offers. Great for the best customer service carrier in France!

My Trip To Sao Paulo

Here I am posting on my blog from Brazil! This has been a very tiring trip!

Our first flight of the day was a domestic one to Paris-CDG where we were supposed to have a little more than an hour to enjoy the AF Business Class lounge before boarding our second flight to Sao Paulo (GRU).

It unfortunately didn't work out that way as our first flight was delayed and took off 1 hr 1/2 later than scheduled. This meant that, eventhough we were met by a car at the exit of our first flight, we still had to rush through terminals in order to make it on time!

We hopefully made it and eventhough our journey did not start off where it should have (AF Business Class Lounge), we did enjoy our flight.

Let me emphasize the fact that I have always been amazed by the quality of the food in business class aboard AF! My "foie gras" was very good. I then had some lamb which was almost perfectly prepared and followed by a nice selection of cheese! I also had good wines and champagne, as well as a pear "eau-de-vie" with my coffee!

A very nice meal which, in my experience, exceeds by far what I have eaten in Business Class aboard other carriers.

Our second meal was only ok though so not worth writing about!

After more than 11 hours in the air, we finally landed in GRU, only to find out that one of our bags hadn't arrived! This is the third time for me this year and a bit too much in my opinion, particularly considering it was on business class flights and that I am a Flying Blue Platinum member... The one bag that arrived hadn't been tagged with a priority label meant for business class passengers. This happens very often with Air France and is very annoying to say the least. How can they advertise benefits that they don't actually enforce?

Hotlines In France

I am getting more and more frustrated and angry at hotlines... I am not blaming the individuals that answer the phone as I believe they are poorly trained and underpaid. I am blaming big corportations that profit from this system as all hotlines in France are set up on overpriced phone numbers. Nobody's wondering how come they never solve any problem quickly eventhough the longer you stay on the line the more they make money!