I was thinking maybe Qantas had finally made some improvements to their customer service, but sadly my recent experience shows otherwise. BTW I'm Bronze so no special treatment for me.
Last Friday I tried to book a simple award multi-city itinerary through the website, SYD-SIN then DAD-BKK-SYD. 3 flights pretty simple you'd think. But the booking process kept crashing at the end after I entered everything, with the "oops something went wrong" message. So, with heavy heart I rang up to make the booking manually. To my surprise the phone was answered almost immediately even though it was mid-afternoon. The woman I spoke with tried to make the booking but had some problem and said that the DAD-BKK sector with Bangkok Air couldn't be booked as classic award only as points+pay. When I argued that I could bring it up myself as a stand-alone flight, she had an idea and got me to hang on while she tried something. Eventually, she came back and said she'd managed to do it. I asked what the problem was but her answer didn't make much sense. I didn't really care, the flights were in my account and all was well. I just asked her to make absolutely sure that the booking would get ticketed. I had a RTW booking last year that had flights drop off because it wasn't ticketed in time, so I'm very conscious of getting that last step done asap. So, she assured me 24 to 48 hours definitely.
That was Friday, I waited till Sunday and called back. Again answered pretty quickly. Was told again 24 to 48 hours definitely.
Called again Monday, to be told that the points hadn't been deducted. So, they fixed that, and said this time definitely 24 to 48 hours for ticketing.
Called again Tuesday. Asked for the booking to be expedited. They said they would push it into the urgent queue, and definitely 24 to 48 hours it would be ticketed.
Called again Wednesday, today. The guy looked at the booking said everything was correct but could see it was dropping out of the ticketing queue and would have to get it manually ticketed. He would need to contact the ticketing department personally to get it done. I volunteered to wait online, but he said it could take him an hour or two to get through to them. So, I asked for a call back when it was done. I put the phone down thinking that was the last time I would be talking to that fellow. But to my astonishment he called me about 2 hours later to say that it was all done and the email was on it's way. When I checked my inbox there was my ticket!
So, I spent 130 minutes on the phone across 5 days plus the time I spent trying to get the website to accept the booking in the first place., to make a simple booking that I should have been able to do on the website. No wonder the call centres are overworked! Also, why on earth is their system so clunky, why does a booking even have to go to the ticketing department, once it's created and paid for, why isn't there just an automatic issuing of the ticket. Do they ever refuse to ticket a booking that's been made and checked?
Anyway, the moral is keep calling every day until you get the outcome you want. It probably isn't going to happen unless you do.
thanks for letting me know
