I don’t post often but thought I would share with you a recent Qantas horror story. So awful that it has actually made me seriously consider “divorcing” my relationship with the airline…
As a QF Plat member who arranges all of his own travel directly through Qantas, and checks-in online etc., I rarely have any interaction with airport/lounge staff. So imagine my surprise last Friday when, arriving at Melbourne airport some 5 hours earlier than planned, I was denied an earlier flight to Brisbane. In Business Class, no less, on a paid ticket. I was totally confused as I knew there were seats available on the next flight (and the next one and the next one….). The really rude customer “service” guy in the lounge told me (almost verbatim) “you’ve bought the cheapest business class ticket and the next flight with that fare class (I) isn’t until Saturday morning”. I paid $650 for this ticket – which apparently is a 28-day advance ticket, but which is also fully refundable. He told me that I could go downstairs to ticketing, and pay an extra $500 to upgrade to a full J class in order to get the next flight. Or – and this is the best part – cancel my ticket and get a full refund, buy a new Flex fare in economy (for about $550) and then use 7,500 frequent flyer points to upgrade to business class. I cannot begin to tell you how confused this whole conversation left me. He then went on to say that “if you want flexible fares you have to choose the more expensive one” – and here we get to the real issue. As everyone knows, when you book a paid domestic flight on qantas.com, it shows you 3 fares: Red e-deal, Flex, and Business - and there are fare rules for those 3 categories. It doesn’t allow further drilling down into the various fare buckets contained within those fares – to prove to myself that I wasn’t imagining things, I even reconfirmed this was the case by making a new dummy booking – one-way MEL-BNE in business class on June 13 is currently $650. There is no option to pay more.
I usually buy a Flex, and it is usually around $500/$600. Sometimes it is higher, but I have never been denied an earlier flight with a Flex – and I highly doubt that every time I have changed a Flex ticket the exact fare class has been conveniently available. I asked to speak to a manger and was told “you can but it won’t make a difference”. The attitude just blew me away.
Of course there will be people who say “the rules are the rules”, but we all know QF can be a bit inconsistent with how they apply them. But from a process point of view, Qantas has a real problem here where their own sales portal doesn’t allow someone to buy a full-fare ticket even if they wanted to. One is merely presented with a price, at a point in time, for each of the 3 (Red e-deal, Flex, Business). Once again, a fully refundable ticket (incl no-show!) gives one the impression that it is also flexible! However the thing that gets me the angriest is the way they talked to me. So rude. Didn’t care. Really dismissive. The guys just stared at me with a blank “computer says no” face. And here I was thinking that as a “valued” customer they would take me seriously! Wow did I learn a lesson that day.
Anyway, after I was humiliated enough I headed outside to ticketing, cancelled my ticket, walked across to Virgin, and purchased a one-way business class ticket for $799 - sure it cost me $150 more in the end but there was a point I needed to make.
In my opinion, Qantas loses in this situation in 2 ways. Firstly, they lost $650 in revenue for no real reason. But more importantly, they enabled (or forced) a normally very loyal customer to experience the competition – and I loved it! Not only was VA’s price about $500 cheaper, the product was much better. They offer booze before take-off (don’t know why QF doesn’t do that?), the cabin is smaller and more intimate, the food was great, the staff really friendly, but best of all – there was no terrible tacky safety demo video (am I the only one that finds the QF demo video exhausting to listen to?)
I am LTG with Qantas, and to be perfectly frank, the oneworld Sapphire benefits that provides with other airlines is more attractive to me than Qantas itself. I am seriously considering abandoning my annual marathon to maintain Platinum, switching to VA for domestic, and flying CX/JL/MH etc. when going overseas. It’s amazing how cheap fares are on those carriers as long you don’t care about the status credits!
The way I am feeling at the moment I couldn’t care if I never stepped inside the Red Rat again.
#sadface
I've been p#@@ed by QF myself a few times lately so even I am now putting my feelers out and am trying what the competition has to offer, after 15+ years of close-to-loyalty to OneWorld. 
