JAGtickets – Concert organizer FAIL

Posted on March 29, 2011 · 2 Comments

Here’s part 2 of my Michael Bublé concert experience.

So two weeks ago I blogged about the awesome Michael Bublé concert on March 13th. Part 2 of the post has to do with how the concert organisers weren’t so good in, organising.

JAGtickets.com.my (owned by JAG Entertainment & Design) were the organisers for the last leg of Bublé’s Crazy Love tour. They promised big things:

“Rest assured that we have invested in the best for the concert – expect state-of-the-art sound systems, lighting and an elaborate stage that will simply dazzle you (as though the music wasn’t divine enough already!). You may have attended concerts before, but we promise that this one will be unlike any other that you’ve experienced.”

They delivered on their promise—it was top of the class, spectacular, unbelievably extraordinary. Who would have doubted their capabilities? JAG is run by a guy with a team bragging a long list of reputable references and successful projects. I’m talking about Walt Disney premiere events, involvement in renowned theme park projects such as Ocean Park in Hong Kong, and even Cinema Expo International, Europe’s largest gathering of Motion Picture Theatre Industry.

BUT … they HAD to mess up seating arrangements.

We got into the stadium and to the location of where our seats were, but then was told that we had to wait for a bit before we’re shown to our seats. Time passed us by and a group of us (approx 30 – 40 people) were still standing along the walkway waiting to be told where to sit.

Every staff I stopped to ask about what’s going on, gave me the same excuse—that their sorting out the seating. I don’t get what’s so hard about showing us to our seats. Our tickets say seats B12 and B13. What’s the point of having a seat number but now you tell me I don’t have a seat?

Turns out the problem was…there isn’t a row B.

To be exact, there weren’t any rows A to L.

The block where we’re supposed to be seated started from rows M to Z.

What an FML moment.

45 minutes after we arrived at the stadium, with minutes before Bublé appeared on stage, WE WERE STILL STANDING! I know I got the cheapest tickets but HEY they still cost us RM 500 for those two freaking seats!

How could a concert organiser even make this mistake? And even so, why wasn’t it discovered before concert goers arrived into the venue? And why did it take so long to rectify the problem?

We finally got our seat just as the Bublé got on stage, but there were still at least 20 – 30 people waiting for their seats, standing along the walkway, shouting at staff who were walking pass, angry and upset why they had no place to sit. Who wouldn’t be? I could have paid less money to buy free standing tickets if I wanted to stand, no?

Yeah, so your T&Cs say that you “may add, withdraw or substitute seating arrangements without prior notice”. But is it our problem if you can’t even figure out your A to Zs?

JAGtickets PLEASE don’t mess up future concert experiences. Because this one left a really bad taste in my mouth.

Nuff’ said.

 

Filed Under: The in-betweens Tagged With: , ,

Villa Danieli Review – the worst Italian restaurant in KL (UPDATED)

Posted on March 3, 2011 · 6 Comments

Update:

Hail the power of social media!!

The F&B Director from Sheraton Imperial contacted me to formally apologise for the bad experience we had while dining at Villa Danieli.
Thanks Greg Hjorth for the courtesy call. It is this kind of response to feedback that will improve the quality of service at your F&B outlets.
Greg’s also informed me that there’s a new chef and restaurant manager at Villa Danieli. Perhaps we can re-visit again soon

The original blog post follows.
__ __ __

I don’t usually do food/restaurant reviews. I only take time to write them when i’m extremely dissapointed with the service and quality of food served. Just like that last time i wrote about the terrible food and service at Logenhaus in Taipan.

We had our team lunch last Monday at Sheraton Imperial’s italian restaurant, the Villa Danieli. The restaurant in itself is quite nice–felt like I was in some cottage in countryside Italy.

The “nice” ended there.

Here’s the bad:

  1. Waiting staff were “lembap”
  2. Restaurant manager was rude, and impatient
  3. Food service was slow
  4. Food quality was crappy

We arrived at 1.20 pm, and when we sat down, the first thing the restaurant manager asked if we were in a rush–and if so he’d suggest a set lunch of 3 choices for us to choose from. My boss insisted that we all went ala carte (i suppose he also wanted to have some choice too, so we all were given our menus). The waiter took our order carefully but the service was slow.  The appetisers came out at different timings, some only arrived after some mains have been served. The waiting staff were not on their feet with the utensils (some needed soup spoons, some didn’t, water wasn’t refilled, drink orders were slow to be served). You wouldn’t expect this level of service from a 5-star F&B outlet.

There were 12 of us, and the last order was served at 2.30pm. Imagine, waiting over an hour, in a restaurant that is not running at full capacity? Lunch was almost turning out to be tea break!

The food quality was also questionable. It was tasteless, the portions were mediocre, and the certainly not worth the price! My saffron risotto had 4 pathetic scallops that cost RM 48.00! The risotto was bland–i ate half of it and i felt pukey already. I thought dessert could save the day but my canolli was horrible! The canolli shell itself wasn’t crisp–and it tasted “old”. When something tastes like yesterday’s frying oil, it can’t be good.

My colleagues also complained of their respective dishes–lamb was not cooked to the requested order of “well done”, pasta sauce was nothing to shout about, pizza toppings were stingy. Seriously, the only saving grace were the bread rolls!

The thing i was most pissed at with is the attitude of the restaurant manager. He was so rude! He was probably having a bad day but that doesn’t mean you can be rude to your customers lor! I totally lost it when we were trying to order our desserts. My boss wanted something that wasn’t in the menu–he asked for an Affogato which is merely vanilla ice cream drizzled with espresso. Mr Restaurant Manager took the order–then came back and mentioned that they ran out of vanilla ice cream. DUDE–you’re in a freaking hotel, don’t tell me you can get vanilla ice cream from your other 3 F&B outlets?

Sure enough, he came back with our Affogato in a coffee cup–but to our horror, the ice cream had already melted as he had drowned it with the piping hot espresso. Okay, I don’t know jack shit about Italian desserts, but I do know that an Affogato looks like this:

It’s supposed to look like this because, you serve the ice cream AND the espresso separately, so we can do this:

And guess what Mr Restaurant Manager responded with?

“This is the way we serve Affogato here.”

Wahlaueh…*speechless*

And the drama didn’t end there. After the affogato incident my boss complained that everything was not up to expectation. We didn’t get billed for the affogato but we did get more excuses from Mr Restaurant Manager. Among the other remarks he made were:

“We are understaffed in our kitchen today”

“Our usual chef is not in today”

“I suggested the set lunch so you could have been served quicker”

I’ll stop here and let you make your own conclusion.

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: , ,

IOI Boulevard Parking FAIL: Inconvenienced by payment system

Posted on August 22, 2010 · 3 Comments

Last Friday night I met up with my girlfriends over dinner at Umai-ya which recently opened in IOI Boulevard. Located in a commercial area directly opposite IOI Mall, IOI Boulevard’s concept follows after Jaya One, with an array of coffee joints, bars, restaurants and an occasional live band performing in the foyer. Built within an already populated community of commercial properties, it only makes sense for IOI Boulevard to include ample parking space in its vicinity. For the unfamiliar, tenants include Munich, Kissaten, Otak Otak Place, XO Shabu Shabu, Pappa Rich, and Honeymoon Dessert to name a few.

When it comes to a big commercial building as such, we would expect the automated parking management system to be pretty standard i.e. we need to make payment before exiting the parking lot. I’m writing this blog post to announce to all in the web universe that the IOI Boulevard Parking payment system is MAJOR FAIL.

Here’s what happened:

I paid for my parking at the automated kiosk. Inserted RM 10 for a RM 2 payment (as i didn’t have small change). Instead of getting my change back, I was given a “refund receipt”, which instructed me to walk to the car park management office, and get my RM 8 back.

At this point, I was a bit concerned as I was alone, in a basement car park, and I had no idea where the heck the car park management office is at. Thankfully, it was a mere 20 meters from where the payment kiosk is located.

I walked over to the office and there was another couple in there and we realised that, THERE’S NO ONE THERE TO GIVE US OUR REFUND! I see phone numbers stuck on the wall, and I called one of the numbers. No answer.

Two minutes later, 2 of the parking management staff shows up, and takes the refund receipt from me and the couple. He asked me if I had RM 2, cos he only had RM 10. I looked at him and said, “If I had RM 2, I won’t have inserted RM 10 right?”. So you’d think he was using his brain after I said this but NO…he went on and asked the couple if they had RM 1 (cos their refund was RM 9). At this point, I almost fainted at his dumbness.

The couple managed to take out all of the coins they had and gave him RM 1.

Then, my turn. I decided to look for coins in my car and see if I had enough. Instead of the staff trying to get spare change, he asked me to exit the parking first, in case the 15 minute grace period was up (cos it’s like taking us forever to get my refund back right? wtf wtf)

I literally ran to my car, drove over to the management office, took out whatever coins I had and chucked it on the table. Instead of saying sorry for the inconvenience, he was pissed at me giving him 2 x 5 sen coins! WHAT THE F?

Maybe it was the sashimi that kept my cool cos I was surprised why I didn’t yell at that incompetent piece of nutjob. I made it out of the parking just in time but i guess the next time i come here, I’d probably not park in the basement.

Filed Under: The in-betweens Tagged With: , ,

one of those days

Posted on August 4, 2010 · 2 Comments

Frustration

Photo credit – Frustration by music2work2 on Flickr

We’ve all had one of those days where

• You have a flat tire
• Your can’t start your car because your car battery’s gone flat
• Your car battery’s gone flat because you forgot to switch off your headlights
• Your windscreen breaks
• You lock your keys inside your car

You get the drift…

For me, it’s plain getting stuck in an unusual traffic jam. Note the word, unusual. Having grown so used to making it to work in under 20 minutes; if I get stuck in a jam, it pretty much has ruined my morning. I know that accidents and vehicle breakdowns are beyond my control, but it sucks so much to be part of the crawl!

For the record, I am rarely late for work. If my boss can make it to the office on time, I should be able to too (considering he lives in KL and I in Shah Alam). I take pride in the fact that I can get up on time and stroll into the office before everyone else. Which . is . why . I’m . so . hard . on . myself . when . I . am . late!

So, to anticipate that I “may” get stuck in an unusual jam sometime in the near future, I guess I just need to wake up earlier and leave the house earlier too!

P/S: On a random note, I watch this video to de-stress. Love it at 0:43!

YouTube Preview Image
Filed Under: Work Tagged With: , ,

Red tape, bureaucracy, or simply pride & stupidity?

Posted on June 14, 2010 · 5 Comments

Photo credit – the original red tape by SuttonHoo on Flickr

I rarely rant about work. Why?

  1. I try to keep my blog free from negative vibes
  2. I limit sharing too much work-related content so I won’t bore my only 3 friends who actually read my blog
  3. To protect my ass in case the Bosh finds my blog
  4. I just want my little space on the innernet be a happy and fun place

HOWEVER, I’m breaking the norm. Just this one time.

Every year, I need to produce a port & shipping industry related conference in India. IMHO technically, if you’ve worked on the same project for 3 years in a row, every year after would be a breeze innit? Nope, not in the case of India. Every year the red tape gets wider and longer & the bureaucracy gets more ridiculous. What is with all the pride? Why do procedures and processes change every freaking year? Why follow rules which are obviously made just to give that 100,000,000th person in the population a job that pays him peanuts?

I can’t believe that 3 years on we still have to deal with bribery–we need to kow tow to a certain few, rub shoulders with the big Kahunas to get things going and “offer” freebies to move forward just to make that profit. Working with the same vendors doesn’t mean it’ll get easier too. Every year there will be something “new” to add into our invoices, prices suddenly increase (because we need to pay 5 people to do our job when 1 person can actually get it done), and there’s bound to be a fee which has never existed in the past to suddenly miraculously appear.

Vendor woes aside, I have to deal with people who’s heads are bigger than the hats their wearing. Small kuci rats who want to speak at the conference and ask for every Rupee in their travel cost be covered. Eenie-meenie CEOs who boast of their expertise, strengths, intelligence and power but isn’t willing to pay for a night’s stay at the conference venue. So-called “big shots” who don’t respect punctuality and expect to be welcomed on a red carpet when they are already 10 minutes late for their presentation. Hey, you’re not the Queen!

I know that God had put these challenges on my lap so that I can work on my patience, work on improving my communications and work on my attitude and dislike I have for this project. However, I can’t help but see that every year as it gets tougher and tougher–it’s because of the idiots in the system! Why can’t they see past their pride? Why can’t things be simplified for the benefit of all parties? How does a country move forward if there are so many potholes and speedbumps along the way (p/s: a certain few may say, “Hey, are you talking about Malaysia?”. This one we keep for another day, in a separate discussion *ahem*).

Perhaps, this has been deeply grounded in their culture? Perhaps, it is the way of life that cannot be changed? Perhaps, they are just all idiots. Nuff’ said.

Filed Under: Work Tagged With: ,