I'm a bit late to this thread. But I sympathise with the
@latawiec here. This is not the first time customers were caught in the baggage allowance with a variety of airlines, not just MH.
It is also worth mentioning that, MH introduced 3 fare types - Lite, Saver & Flex. When this classification was introduced (early 2023, from what my TA says), there was 0kg allowance when purchasing a Lite fare. Customers have the option to upgrade to a Saver fare for as low as $30 and to a Flex fare from as low as $150. Now obviously, these $ to upgrade will vary with the route.
With the 0kg fare, passengers (and TAs) had issues. So MH has now introduced Lite fares with 10kg allowance. So purchasing the cheapest ticket now gives at least 10kg allowance.
It wasn't really MH at issue here.
The problem is not with Malaysian
Agree with this. The issue is not with the airline itself. The issue is with the supplier that
booking.com uses that automatically reverts the fare to the lowest fare bucket - so that they can retain the sale and be advertised as having the lowest fare. The issue with the lowest fare (in most cases, IME) is that, all that the pax get is a seat on the plane (and meals too, in the case of MH). I have had friends, colleagues who do the same thing.
They checked our tickets on their airline system and informed us that they have a different version of tickets on their system, which includes only the "Light economy luggage allowance" without the checked bags although our "check and pay" screenshot showed two 20kg checked bags allowance.
The airline will go after what it says on their system. I have had this happened to a mate. He booked & paid for the 20kg allowance on MH, but the consolidator that his TA uses, booked the pax on the 10kg fare. When the ticket was issued, I was with my mate and I noticed that the allowance was only 10kg. My mate alerted is TA and the TA alerted the consolidator (I initially thought the that TA mucked the booking, but later confirmed that the consolidator mucked it up).
From my perspective, the issue is not even the baggage allowance (10kg). The issue is the terms of the ticket itself. A Lite fare is very restrictive. Any change that needs to be done on a Lite fare warrants a $150 change fee, which is effectively set to $0 on a Saver fare, for the first change. So when my mate wanted to do a change of travel dates, he was slapped with a $150 change + fare difference + consolidator fee (which we argued to be waived off because we are in the pickle because of the consolidators' incompetence) and my TA waived off his service fee for the booking. He somehow felt responsible even though the issue was with the consolidator.
In any case, my mate later paid all the penalties to change his travel date.
IME the issue with all these Online TAs is that they are a money making business (which business isn't eh?) and have very little for their customers. I have been lucky that my TA is good.