Qantas Customer DON'T care!

[mannej]

How did the airline "let you down in life threatening destinations"? If you're going to publicly accuse them of doing that how about some facts of what actually happened?

I was going to ask the same question.

 

[amp-qld]

Ozbeachbabe,

How did the airline "let you down in life threatening situations"? If you're going to publicly accuse them of doing that how about some facts of what actually happened?

I was trying to avoid burdening people with the long stories. The first situation was when we were ordered to evacuate from Jakarta as the Suharto government collapsed. My wife and I were both Qantas Club members at the time and had open dated return tickets to Brisbane but, despite many attempts to clarify the situation both in Jakarta and in Sydney, Qantas just would not tell us the seat situation. I had to drive through rioting mobs to a rendezvous point not knowing whether we'd get on the flight. Even at the airport, we couldn't get any answer out of Qantas. I understand that the flight departed with some empty seats. In the end, we caught Singapore Airlines (who responded magnificently) to Singapore after waiting 12½ hours at the airport. As I said in my first post, when I complained a number of times, Qantas wouldn't respond any more than an irrelevant pro forma reply.

The second situation was when I was on a Qantas issued set of tickets through South America. I was supposed to take a boat across Lake Titicaca then a bus to La Paz and catch a LAN Chile flight from there to Santiago. I already had an allocated seat. Unfortunately, there was a revolution in Bolivia and they were shooting people trying to cross the border at that location. I therefore tried to change my point of boarding to an interim stop but still using the same seat on the same flight. My wife was in Brisbane so, between us, we tried many times to get Qantas to accept the change. Once again, they just would not give a response. I therefore had to buy another ticket to travel on the same flight and that was when I discovered that if I didn't cancel the leg, the rest would be cancelled. I ended up literally running around Puno (at over 3 800 m altitude) in torrential rain trying to sort it out. Luckily, I didn't suffer much from altitude sickness. Once again, when I complained (including follow ups), I never got a relevant reply.

My attitude is that things are going to go wrong and it's how organisations respond (both in physical and follow up aspects) that's important. In both cases, Qantas failed miserably both physically and from a PR viewpoint. To me, that means Qantas's customer care was plain bad and I've tried to avoid them ever since. I may not have much status but I have flown well over half a million miles and give talks on travel, in which Qantas don't get any complimentary comments.

 

[TomB]

Re: QANTAS Don't Care.
This is an interesting but complex statement. On the first instance I will agree strongly that QANTAS does not care. I base this on a number of negative experiences that have demonstrated poor systems, processes, training and supervision as the contribution of the corporate entity and then there is the poor attitude displayed by individuals working for the company.

On the other hand, I have also enjoyed some excellent above the call of duty service from QANTAS staff. In a number of instances flight changes have been made, when possible, without a big song and dance and often without charging when they could have done so.

My analysis of the entire question of service is not whether it is or is not there but that the Senior Leadership Team does not appear to know where it is good and where it is not good.

Due to a significant event of poor service, I decided over a year ago that I would no longer use QANTAS as my preferred carrier. I wanted to see how long it would be before their systems realised that a Platinum FF had stopped flying. After a little more than a year of not being a customer, does anyone want to guess how much interest they have shown in retaining me as a client? I will give you a hint. It starts with zero and ends with zero.

On the whole I like QANTAS but to keep me as a committed customer and not just best price for the flight or lounge access, they need to get a lot better at knowing how the client is being serviced and what staff behaviours are beinG exhibited before the client is lost to the competition.

 

[straitman]

Re: QANTAS Don't Care.
This is an interesting but complex statement. On the first instance I will agree strongly that QANTAS does not care. I base this on a number of negative experiences that have demonstrated poor systems, processes, training and supervision as the contribution of the corporate entity and then there is the poor attitude displayed by individuals working for the company.

On the other hand, I have also enjoyed some excellent above the call of duty service from QANTAS staff. In a number of instances flight changes have been made, when possible, without a big song and dance and often without charging when they could have done so.

My analysis of the entire question of service is not whether it is or is not there but that the Senior Leadership Team does not appear to know where it is good and where it is not good.

Due to a significant event of poor service, I decided over a year ago that I would no longer use QANTAS as my preferred carrier. I wanted to see how long it would be before their systems realised that a Platinum FF had stopped flying. After a little more than a year of not being a customer, does anyone want to guess how much interest they have shown in retaining me as a client? I will give you a hint. It starts with zero and ends with zero.

On the whole I like QANTAS but to keep me as a committed customer and not just best price for the flight or lounge access, they need to get a lot better at knowing how the client is being serviced and what staff behaviours are being exhibited before the client is lost to the competition.

I was going to say that this could happen with any airline but apparently I can't as that makes me a VA loyalist and a QF downer.

Doesn't matter that I have effectively done no VA flying this year (30SC) and about 1400 QF SC. My response from VA was exactly the same as what you got from QF. (Sorry you didn't do enough flying with us so here's your Gold card.) i.e. no real interest.

Having said that I'm not sure what else I would expect from them as having worked for big business (much bigger than QF & VA combined) I am extremely cynical about many things they do.

 

[juddles]

.......literally running around Puno (at over 3 800 m altitude) in torrential rain trying to sort it out.........

Love it!! I feel your pain. Unfortunately for QF, it is a tad hard to convey the situation you are in. I was once in a remote jungle área of Colombia, managed to climb a mountain there to get mobile (and thus basic internet data), and immediately got a message from a court in Queensland instructing me to immediately jump online at the ¨closest teleconferencing facility¨.

 

[Archphoto]

What's the T/A doing for the client? What do the fare rules say?


Edit: QF will only deal with the agent/person who directly made the booking as far as I know. Not with the passenger if using a T/A.

We had a TA organise all our travel several years back, but when I was being charged $250/change fee every time I needed to make flight changes, I started to question why? (The final straw was a $500/change fee!)

I called QF to see what the cost to change the flight would be - $85. The CSO then said she wasn't able to do so, as the original booking had been made by a TA. I questioned if she could change it for me, explaining that the TA was going to charge me $500 for the same flight - no problem at all, she did it all for me in about 15 seconds.

I understand that TAs can help in situations like the OP found themselves in (yet they were totally unhelpful in this instance it seems so why do people really bother??), but after that experience, I'm now rather wary of TAs in general. If I could find a reliable, honest TA that understands my situation, whose eyes don't light up with $$ signs when they see how much we travel, I'd happily use them.

Unfortunately, I'm yet to find one that fits the bill. Until then, we run the gauntlet of booking directly through the airline(s) websites and hoping changes won't kill our hip pockets.

 

[TomB]

Bill:

agree with comment completely. A very high number of businesses and organisations are under performing and
senior Leadership Team has no idea of how employee behaviours are or are not alligning with corporate goals and objectives. Neither do they have a valid process to allow employees to provide un censored, valuable feedback on issues that are adversely affecting to organisation.

 

[RAM]

Very easily done by using the multicity booking page online, I have done so in the past. If you book PER-xx_ as one date, and then xx_-xx_ as a later date, the system will select the same fares but give you a choice of flights with the fare bucket on offer.

I agree that is the theory but of 4 times I have tried it (checking that the individual legs and same class was available) 3 times the Europe return fare increase per person between $500 and $1,100.
So last year I booked to SYD-LHR, LHR-MUC and INN-SYD as three separate bookings (using a Q codeshare BA/EK/Q flight for LHR-MUC and INN-LGW-SYD).

Using the multi-city at the exact same time (IE open for multi city and Firefox open for legging it) as the 3 leg (found it more convenient to fly INN-LGW than MCU-LHR still at same fare class but actually cheaper still) - was $4,950 cheaper for 5 adults as I finally booked it. Using MUC and LHR both ways would have saved $4,800 vs what the multi-city was showing me for the identical flight sequences.

I had all three of the legs 'live at the same time and cut & pasted the info so each was ready to go within a few seconds of each other (I'd checked and there were still over 9 seats available in the classes for each leg but you never know...).

I don't think the multi-city should be relied on without checking the legging it before booking.

BTW - the return cost was $125 cheaper than the outward even though we came back on the last day possible for school start in January 2014.