Qantas Club Renewal Trickery ??

[Baysider]

My wife's Qantas Club renewal is due. On re-reading the email early this evening, we noticed that it says "New rates will come into effect on 1 February 2011, but if you renew by 31 January 2011, you can renew at existing rates". However, after following the "renew" link from the email, we have tried 5 times tonight to complete the renewal and every time we submit after providing credit card details a page appears with the message:
"Sorry. The site is experiencing difficulties at present. We apologise for the delay and will endeavour to restore operations as soon as possible. Please try again in a short while. In the meantime you can contact us on 13 13 13 within Australia or your nearest Qantas office for all other enquiries. Thank you for your patience."
Am I just being cynical or does this seem to be a convenient way of forcing everyone to pay the higher renewal charges tomorrow?

 

[straitman]

My wife's Qantas Club renewal is due. On re-reading the email early this evening, we noticed that it says "New rates will come into effect on 1 February 2011, but if you renew by 31 January 2011, you can renew at existing rates". However, after following the "renew" link from the email, we have tried 5 times tonight to complete the renewal and every time we submit after providing credit card details a page appears with the message:
"Sorry. The site is experiencing difficulties at present. We apologise for the delay and will endeavour to restore operations as soon as possible. Please try again in a short while. In the meantime you can contact us on 13 13 13 within Australia or your nearest Qantas office for all other enquiries. Thank you for your patience."
Am I just being cynical or does this seem to be a convenient way of forcing everyone to pay the higher renewal charges tomorrow?

I think you are being cynical though I understand your cynicism.

The Qantas site is well know for it's gremlins and hence I would try not leave things to the last minute in case it does this.

 

[JohnK]

Am I just being cynical or does this seem to be a convenient way of forcing everyone to pay the higher renewal charges tomorrow?

I would call Qantas tomorrow and explain how you tried renewing online and could not proceed due to errors encountered on the website. Qantas should be able to process the renewal at the promised rate.

Interesting though that Qantas Lounge rates are increasing as of tomorrow.

 

[Baysider]

As if to prove my suspicions, the renewal link now shows a $35 higher price (at 2 minutes BEFORE midnight, NSW time).

 

[wingspan]

I would say that the reason the website was buggy was because the update was in the middle of being set in place, confusing the server and consequently returning you the error.

I'm 99% confident that if you call them this morning and explain what happened, they will renew for you at the old rate. Let us know how it goes though!

 

[Gremlin]

The Qantas site is well know for it's gremlins and hence I would try not leave things to the last minute in case it does this.

I swear it wasn't me!!

 

[JetLagged]

I swear it wasn't me!!

Ah, don't take it personally, Gremlin - given the well known propensity of the AF website to collapse in a screaming heap, some of the multitude of your relatives must have found useful work there! Maybe others are hard at work over at NAB?

Question - just how many gremlins (lowers case 'g') does it take to stuff up a system?

 

[JohnK]

Question - just how many gremlins (lowers case 'g') does it take to stuff up a system?

Only one! Sometimes a simple spelling mistake (1 character) can be enough to bring any system to a grinding halt.

Off to work to see which gremlins the development team have put into the software this time....

 

[NM]

Only one! Sometimes a simple spelling mistake (1 character) can be enough to bring any system to a grinding halt.

Off to work to see which gremlins the development team have put into the software this time....

OT - if the process of finding and removing the gremlins is called "Debugging" then the process of putting them there in the first place should be called "Buggering" rather than the commonly used "Programming"

 

[NM]

As if to prove my suspicions, the renewal link now shows a $35 higher price (at 2 minutes BEFORE midnight, NSW time).

Let us know how you get on with renewing at the old rate.

 

[drewbles]

Only one! Sometimes a simple spelling mistake (1 character) can be enough to bring any system to a grinding halt.

Off to work to see which gremlins the development team have put into the software this time....

heck even just a simple space where there shouldn't be one can bring things to a halt (or a hard ^M in the wrong place that doesn't appear in some editors; chomp scripts are your friend in such instances!).

With Content Management Systems, things can break easily if the back-end isn't coded right, and it often isn't unfortunately.

 

[JohnPhelan]

However, after following the "renew" link from the email, we have tried 5 times tonight to complete the renewal and every time we submit after providing credit card details a page appears with the message:
"Sorry. The site is experiencing difficulties at present. We apologise for the delay and will endeavour to restore operations as soon as possible. Please try again in a short while. In the meantime you can contact us on 13 13 13 within Australia or your nearest Qantas office for all other enquiries. Thank you for your patience."

By any chance, were you trying to renew the membership - which is in your wife's name - with a credit card in your name?

One of the "known gremlins" in the Qantas Club membership software is that it simply can't cope with a membership renewal for person A being paid for with person B's credit card.

(I don't know why this is a problem, because the QF system is quite happy to accept payments for flights from someone one than the named passenger.)

I have found that, if you want to use your credit card to pay for a Qantas Club renewal for someone else, you get that error message that you have quoted. You then ring them and they say "oh yes, we know, the system doesn't like that so you have to do that sort of payment by phone". :evil:

 

[serfty]

OT - if the process of finding and removing the gremlins is called "Debugging" then the process of putting them there in the first place should be called "Buggering" rather than the commonly used "Programming"

OT

Actually, the word "Debugging" is passe - the more contemporary term is "Correction Opportunity".

 

[Baysider]

Apologies for the late update: My wife did call the next day and was renewed at the old rate.

 

[nlagalle]

Apologies for the late update: My wife did call the next day and was renewed at the old rate.

Good news.. I didn't think they'd have a problem doing it.

 

[Stafman]

So at the same time that Qantas is removing a lot of the benefits available to QP members, they are hiking the price up????

I wonder if they have any executives from the car insurance industry on their board. Cause the same thing happened with my insurance. The insured value went down, but the price increased as well.

100% glad I cancelled my membership and got a refund.