In relation to the attached booking, my colleague, Mr X and I attended check-in, on time, at Bangkok Airport (BKK) on Sunday 26 July. Both I and Mr X have British passports. On arrival at check-in our passports were inspected and we were told that we could not board as Mr X's passport would not be accepted by Cambodian immigration.
Despite our protests to the contrary, we were denied boarding, and despite having paid for our tickets on Mr X's Mastercard were therefore forced to travel by other means to Phnom Penh the following day, necessitating an unwarranted overnight stay in Bangkok.
On our return flight from Phnom Penh, and despite having reconfirmed our return flight with your Phnom Penh office on Wednesday 29 July, we found that our pre-booked (please see below) vegetarian meals were not available. We were offered Chicken instead and informed that our meals “had not been loaded at Bangkok”. We declined the kind offer of a chicken meal, and so went without. However, towards the end of the flight, and after the seatbelt etc signs had been illuminated in preparation for landing, a caring hostess supplied me with a small salad pot conjured from somewhere, and which my colleague declined.
As frequent travellers, having only recently switched to using Bangkok Airways, we were utterly astonished to be treated in such an unprofessional fashion.
It would seem that The Kingdom of Cambodia need not expend time and energy employing immigration staff as clearly Bangkok Airways staff deem that they can better undertake the task than the trained Cambodian Government officials.
It is apparent that there was no issue with said passport as we were clearly both able to enter Cambodia and return to Thailand at the end of our unpleasantly and unexpectedly truncated holiday. We returned from Phnom Penh to Bangkok on our originally booked return flight on Bangkok Airways on 30 July 2009, PG 0934.
I gained the impression at check-in that your staff were looking for an excuse to deny us boarding. Indeed no suggestion was made, nor any solution proffered which would perhaps have allowed my colleague and I to travel to Phnom Penh that evening. An additional return ticket could easily have been purchased if the need arose, if it then transpired that Mr X was unable to enter Cambodia, then he could simply have returned to Bangkok on the next available flight.
One could perhaps be forgiven for suspecting that in fact the Sunday evening flight to Phnom Penh was full, and in fact overbooked, and that there was a need to “bump” some passengers off the flight. We are both frequent business travellers and understand that this is not unknown.