Hi friends, and thanks for stopping by to ready why Tangerine Bank should learn from Aeromexico about customer recovery.
As most of you know, I have a hate/hate relationship with Tangerine Bank.
One of the worst things about dealing with Tangerine Bank is trying to log on to their website. Sometimes it can take up to 30 minutes to log on. Nice. Just trying to check my balance or pay bills and Tangerine won’t give me access to online banking. Read more about that in my Review of Tangerine Bank.
For many years Tangerine Bank bugged me to get their Mastercard. I am pre-approved! Yippee for me! Seeing as how I have a few credit cards and Tangerine’s credit limit and promotional deal didn’t appeal to me, I never responded.
The day came where Tangerine emailed me another offer and after thinking about it for a couple of weeks, I decided to apply for their credit card – which is a Mastercard. If nothing else, I thought the process of applying would make a good blog post. Click here to read about applying for a Tangerine Bank Mastercard.
Unfortunately, using this Mastercard is just as frustrating as everything else Tangerine. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. There’s a better chance of success using the Tangerine Bank Mastercard in person than there is of using it for an online purchase. If I’m buying something online, it’s hit and miss. Tangerine has lost out in thousands of dollars in sales because their damned card wouldn’t work.
Buying Aeromexico tickets
I’ve chatted a few times about my upcoming adventure of a lifetime in South America.
Travel is about doing, not just dreaming!
I gotta stop all the planning and pull the plug and buy tickets to get me where I wanna go!
It’s time I get to it and buy a ticket for the first leg of my journey. And then the next one, and the next one…
First stop? Mexico City. My options for a non-stop flight are Air Canada and Aeromexico. They both have pros and cons. Aeromexico departs at 7am which means being at the airport at 4am. Yikes! Who is going to haul it out of bed that early to drive me to the airport? Air Canada departs at a much more respectable 5pm.
What is one of my safety tips in Simple Tips to Overcome Fear of Solo Travel in a New City? Unless there is no other option – arrive in daytime. You don’t want to be wandering around a strange place at night.
Aeromexico arrives in Mexico City at 2:45pm and Air Canada arrives at midnight.
Pretty much a no-brainer.
I’d previously created an account with Aeromexico so I logged in, booked my flight, and paid for it with my Tangerine Mastercard. It all went well.
Buying Aeromexico tickets round 2
OK, I admit it. When putting together an epic journey with many moving parts, I can get overwhelmed. So I break it down into smaller, manageable chunks.
The next ticket I needed to purchase was to get out of Mexico City. Destination: Lima, Peru. There are a couple of options with non-stop flights, including Aeromexico. Once again, it came down to arrival times. Aeromexico departs around 8am and arrives in Lima around 3pm. The other airline arrives around midnight.
There were a few other options that arrived late at night and involved changing planes. When possible, I prefer not to change planes. Too much can go wrong if there are flight delays and missed connections. There’s also a greater chance of losing my luggage.
I log back onto Aeromexico’s website, book the ticket, and pay for it with my Tangerine Mastercard. But I had a hell of a time. The payment failed to process. Not declined. Failed.
And for sure not declined because I’ve written many posts about the importance of being debt free and staying debt free and paying off the credit cards in full.
Try again!
Aeromexico kindly sends an email saying: “On hold. Reservation pending.”
Now they’d like me to pay for the trip. There is a “pay now” button in the email.
I click it and it takes me back to my reservation.
As you can imagine, there’s a fair amount of swearing going on as I re-enter my credit card details.
And then my phone rings.
Aeromexico customer recovery
I was just ready to submit my payment again when the phone rang with a weird looking unknown number.
Oh, what the hell. I’ll answer it anyway! Ha ha!
A woman identified herself as from customer recovery from Aeromexico and asked if I was attempting to buy a ticket.
You betcha! I told her my credit card failed when I tried to make payment and I’d received an email from Aeromexico and was trying again.
She told me it had just popped up on her screen that I was unable to complete the purchase and she was here to help.
Wow! Very fast. It had only been a couple of minutes. Very impressive.
Thinking there might have been a glitch on the website, I asked if I could give her my credit card number over the phone to pay for the trip. And yes, I could. I gave her the number and she attempted to apply the payment.
Once again it failed.
Like what the hell Tangerine! You are letting me down – again! Same old song. Shame on you!
The customer recovery agent suggests she can call me back the following day to give me time to call my bank to find out what’s going on, or we can try another card.
Remember. If you are a Tangerine Bank client, it’s extremely important to have other cards in addition to Tangerine’s credit card. They will come in handy all those times that Tangerine’s Mastercard lets you down.
I gave her another credit card. It went through. I’ve paid for my flight. Disaster averted. All is well.
And once again Tangerine has missed out on big bucks from a lost sale with me while their competition is happy to take up the slack.
Amazing customer service
When I say amazing customer service, I’m referring to Aeromexico!
The phrase “amazing customer service” could NEVER be said about Tangerine!
I mean, look what happened here. A failed attempt to buy a ticket on my chosen flight flagged on a computer screen in Aeromexico’s customer recovery department, and within minutes an agent phoned to assist me.
That’s incredible! And in case anyone is wondering, the agent I spoke with is bilingual and assisted me in English – making the customer service even more amazing. I feel like I could have explained the situation in Spanish and given a different credit card number, but was very glad I could do it in English.
Shitty customer service
About the only phrase that can apply to Tangerine Bank’s customer service is: “it’s the shits!”
I’ve had several dozen failed attempts when purchasing with Tangerine’s Mastercard. Not once has anyone at Tangerine phoned to try to fix the situation. Being proactive are words that shall never be spoken at Tangerine – ha ha! One time I phoned them, and the rep was able to force the sale through. Took about 45 minutes.
But not once has Tangerine ever phoned me to attempt customer recovery. Not once! Never! They seem very happy for the sale to go to their competitors instead.
Another Tangerine liar
If I phoned Tangerine everytime there was a screw up, I wouldn’t have time to do anything else in my day. Occasionally I do phone them to see what went wrong.
As I did in the failed ticket purchase with Aeromexico.
The Tangerine “customer service” agent looked up my account to see why the purchase failed to complete.
And get this. She lied to me and said there had been no attempts to use my credit card that day.
LIAR!!!
There were attempts on the Aeromexico website and by the Aeromexico customer recovery agent.
Lying to me only makes it worse. What I don’t know is if the Tangerine “customer service” agent purposely lied to me or if the tools that Tangerine supplies for their staff to do their jobs correctly is defective, useless, piece of shit, or all of the above.
Oh yeah. A little later I get an email from Tangerine to rate them. LOL! Once again I let them have it!
What happened on round 2
It’s perplexing that I was in the same house, same laptop, same WiFi as I was during the first time I bought a ticket on Aeromexico’s website. Tangerine let that first ticket sale go through.
I don’t know why I just didn’t buy the second ticket at the same time, other than I wanted to be very certain how long I’d be in Mexico City. Once I’d reserved my hotel and knew for sure how many nights I’d be there, then I decided to buy the outbound ticket.
Tangerine failed me once again.
Tangerine Bank should learn from Aeromexico about customer recovery
Can you imagine what life would be like for all their customers if Tangerine Bank took lessons from Aeromexico on customer recovery?
Immediately getting on top of a problem and proactively reaching out to the customer is an example of excellent customer service.
Many years ago I worked for the head office of a financial institution and customer recovery was part of our training. For me, a cash incentive would work! Throw a little money at me every time you screw up and I’ll stick around.
Sadly, customer recovery is something Tangerine Bank knows nothing about.
So why do I stick around? The majority of my money and investments are with other financial institutions. Don’t keep all your eggs in one basket. I prefer to use a few banks and credit unions. Occasionally Tangerine offers a high interest rate for a few months on new deposits and that’s when I’ll transfer a lot of money into my account there. I always make a calendar reminder so I can transfer the money out the day after the high interest ends!
But yeah, Tangerine is not the type of bank that should be your main financial institution. It’s kind of like grocery shopping. We should have a big grocery chain with good prices where we do the majority of our shopping. And then there is probably a smaller grocery store where we run in for a couple of things every now and then.
That’s Tangerine. The place that’s on the back burner.
Aeromexico has moved up on my list of preferred airlines. And Tangerine has dropped even lower on the list of banks I deal with.
Have you ever received phenomenal customer recovery from a company? Leave a comment below and lay it on us!
Published by Cheryl @ The Lifestyle Digs on July 3, 2025.
