I was in London and booked to fly back on the impacted QF2 service. Through Flighty app I was getting alerts about the QF1 delay from Singapore so expected it wouldn’t depart on time that night. I wasn’t seeing any changes in the Qantas app to this point.
I then received an SMS from a Qantas team member at LHR advising me the flight would be delayed by at least 13 hours and offering assistance.
They offered to search for flights on other airlines or get me accomodation. I asked them to check other flights that day. She came back and booked me on an oversold Emirates flight with a confirmed Business class seat the whole way through to Melbourne.
From my experiences with Qantas in these matters they have always been proactive and helped as much as they can.
Maybe the difference is I figure they have probably got 400 upset customers, if I can be polite and friendly to the agent they tend to try and do a bit more for me to help. This was the case here, so whilst the situation sounded unavoidable due to the crew hours being exceeded, I didn’t think being aggressive with the team would get me a better result.