False Availability - How much of a thing is it?

[Airbumps]

Hi All,

I'm curious to hear other peoples experience with this. I've got a RTW Oneworld Class booking in J for July that I managed to piece together about 3 months ago. At the time, alot of my preferred flights coming back from LHR to MEL weren't available, so I chose flights that simply "got the job done".

Last week when I was rechecking availability I began to notice my preferred flights started to show J availability so I re-planned my return from London to Melbourne and called Qantas today to make the changes. Thru to the Premium line and I start giving the call taker my prefered flights. The first is a UL flight from FRA-CMB. She tells me she can't see it. I indicate its available on their website and she checks herself, indeed confirming that to be the case. She then puts me on hold for 5 or so minutes to contact another department before coming back and telling me the availability is not really there at all, and its false.

All of this would be fine, except that on the website I can actually go through all pages to the payment stage should I select this flight - so I'm not convinced this is the case.

I'm curious how much of a thing this is in other peoples experience and if there is a way to confirm availability is "false"? I've seen it before with married sector logic, but that always shows an error by the time you get to the payment page.

Anybody got any advice?

Cheers

 

[Airbumps]

Well, turns out my intuition was right.

Called back up today and got Hobart. Bloke took all of five minutes to find the flights his colleague from the day before insisted didn't exist, book them in, adjust the taxes and send me a new itinerary. Indeed he actually said he could see four available seats on the flights I was looking at - Not none like his colleague the day before. Was a pleasure dealing with him.

It appears that ineptitude is still a thing, even when put through to a "premium' call taker.

 

[Dmac59]

Well, turns out my intuition was right.

Called back up today and got Hobart. Bloke took all of five minutes to find the flights his colleague from the day before insisted didn't exist, book them in, adjust the taxes and send me a new itinerary. Indeed he actually said he could see four available seats on the flights I was looking at - Not none like his colleague the day before. Was a pleasure dealing with him.

It appears that ineptitude is still a thing, even when put through to a "premium' call taker.

Well done @Airbumps
One of my early learnings from AFF was If in doubt, HUACA.

 

[Mattg]

Well, turns out my intuition was right.

Called back up today and got Hobart. Bloke took all of five minutes to find the flights his colleague from the day before insisted didn't exist, book them in, adjust the taxes and send me a new itinerary. Indeed he actually said he could see four available seats on the flights I was looking at - Not none like his colleague the day before. Was a pleasure dealing with him.

It appears that ineptitude is still a thing, even when put through to a "premium' call taker.

I've lost count of the number of times someone working in one of Qantas' overseas call centres told me there was no availability, but the folks in Hobart or Auckland can see it.

It's a really poor customer experience and Qantas really ought to have fixed this by now.

 

[XWu]

The fact we all complain about it here there everywhere but there is no obvious attempt to improve this.
Maybe Mattg should do a feature on this and ask them for comment a few hours before posting the article, current affairs style.
Matt if you take up this challenge and risk burning some bridges with QF, you get my respect!

 

[jpp42]

I believe someone explained earlier that the outsourced call centres (SA/Fiji) actually use a different system to the one used by the in-house call centres (Hobart/Auckland) and this system simply is not programmed to see the full availability that the web site has (or that Hobart/Auckland can see). What's ridiculous is the fact they seemingly are not trained to understand this, and do not have any ability to escalate to a call centre that CAN help. Qantas seems to take a very firm line on barring transfers between call centres, I suspect they're worried that people will simply demand it every time, but they could come up with an in-between positions where their agents are better trained to properly understand their own system's limitations.

 

[Airbumps]

I believe someone explained earlier that the outsourced call centres (SA/Fiji) actually use a different system to the one used by the in-house call centres (Hobart/Auckland) and this system simply is not programmed to see the full availability that the web site has (or that Hobart/Auckland can see). What's ridiculous is the fact they seemingly are not trained to understand this, and do not have any ability to escalate to a call centre that CAN help. Qantas seems to take a very firm line on barring transfers between call centres, I suspect they're worried that people will simply demand it every time, but they could come up with an in-between positions where their agents are better trained to properly understand their own system's limitations.

Whilst nothing would surprise me, i would find it bewildering that the same airline is using two systems to look at availability... I mean it's QANTAS so nothing is impossible, but surely that would be a recipe for disaster and disappointment...... oh wait...