Beware Jetstar changing your flights!!

[PT117]

I booked in December to fly from AKL to BKK return with Jetstar in May. Everything was fine until 3 weeks before the departure when, for some unknown reason, I was emailed a copy of my itinerary which I had already received back when I booked my tickets. Fortunately something caught my eye as I went to file it and upon inspection, they had changed 2 of the sectors to completely different days (in one case, 2 days later)! There was absolutely nothing in the email heading to alert me to the changes and had I not noticed it, the trip would have been a complete disaster. Contact with the call centre was useless ( 4 phone calls with differing degrees of English spoken and no supervisor available for me to speak to) and all I was told was I had to take those options (at no charge to myself I was told) as the other flights were no longer flying. Luckily I didn't take their word for it and kept an eye on their website. I found that the first flight had only had a time change ie: was leaving 40 minutes earlier than previously and the second flight was still operating on the day and at the time we had booked. Fortunately my husband took over and got a helpful person at the call centre who fixed everything up for us...at no cost to us... as if they were doing us a favour!! My point is check your emails carefully and NEVER take what you are told by the call centre as gospel...check it out yourself. Despite all this, they are our only LCC option from NZ now that Air Asia has pulled out so will probably use them again.

 

[moa999]

Very weird.
Assume you are flying AKL-SIN-BKK.

JQ has certainly cut the AKL-SIN frequency in recent times

 

[PT117]

Yes it was via SIN but the flights that were affected were actually SIN-BKK and BKK-SIN.

 

[AIRwin]

This also happened to me a few years ago when Jetstar reduced their frequency of their flights from AKL to SIN (it was still operated by 3K then). I had booked it through zuji.co.nz but at least I received an email notification from them (zuji not 3K) and they rebooked me on a JQ flight via SIN on the same day...

 

[MH_fan]

As a rule, you are supposed to be informed of any changes to your itinerary in writing (email) and it is up to you to accept them or not. I have, on one previous occasion, not accepted a flight change with JQ and they refunded my ticket.

 

[PT117]

Yes I would have thought that was the case. So why then did they not make any mention of the fact anywhere in the email? The itinerary looked exactly the same as my previous one but with a different date for one flight and different date and time for another sector! The frustrating thing was there was no apparent reason as these flights were still scheduled and in fact when we ended up flying on the ones we originally booked, weren't full, so it wasn't a case of overselling either.

 

[markis10]

Yes I would have thought that was the case. So why then did they not make any mention of the fact anywhere in the email? The itinerary looked exactly the same as my previous one but with a different date for one flight and different date and time for another sector! The frustrating thing was there was no apparent reason as these flights were still scheduled and in fact when we ended up flying on the ones we originally booked, weren't full, so it wasn't a case of overselling either.

They email you the change details, perhaps the email was caught in the spam box.

 

[PT117]

No, checked the spam box at the time. The final person we spoke to at the call centre admitted he had no idea why they had changed the flights and that there was no reason to do so. I was just wanting to warn others to check carefully when you have made a booking with Jetstar and keep a close eye on the details