On my recent trip to Europe, I’ve seen first-hand how far off the pace Qantas is
greg sheridan
What is the longest you’ve waited on hold for a call centre to rescue you from that doom-loop of aggressively cheesy muzak?
My colleague, Fiona Harari,
wrote a love letter, perhaps a falling-out-of-love letter, to Qantas a few weeks back in which she complained of the habit of
Qantas promising to call back at a certain time and the call never *happening.
Wow! Talk about your Dostoevsky moments – we read to find that we’re not alone. Although the promised Qantas call back that never comes has happened to me seemingly a trillion times (that is to say, four or five times), for some reason I thought it must have been a one-off, or a series of one-offs.
Gosh, could this have been happening to lots of people?
Of course, I get it that dickering with Qantas is quintessentially a First World problem. *Neither Fiona nor I was trying to get the last plane off the doomed island before the volcano erupted.
But still, we spend our hard-earned on Qantas and expect them to more or less measure up.
The other thing to say is that all the Qantas staff I’ve ever met have been as helpful as their system allows, or their training provides. It’s not their fault.After hours of waiting online, the most frustrating answer, when you finally get through, is to be told they have to transfer you to another department – even though the request and the necessary action may be utterly footling – and you have to begin your long night of the soul, accompanied by that sinister muzak, all over again.
Is this the music that will play in purgatory?
Like all big companies, Qantas wants us all to do our business with them online. The problem is every now and again it’s essential to do some business with a human being – redeeming a flight credit, responding to a text message that your flight has been cancelled, and so on.Not so long ago, I was scheduled to come home to Melbourne from Canberra early afternoon to be in plenty of time for my wife’s birthday dinner. One flight after another was cancelled from Canberra and the one flight left was over full.
After a lot of back and forth, I flew from Canberra to Sydney to get to Melbourne, but cancellations in Sydney meant I didn’t get to Melbourne until just before midnight anyway.
I saw in central Europe recently just how far off the service pace Qantas is.
We’d booked online the cheapest flights we could get from London to Dubrovnik – Polish Airlines with a short stopover in Warsaw. The tickets didn’t include checked baggage and I wanted to pay for it in advance. I rang Polish Airlines, expecting a marathon wait and sundry language difficulties, and in a couple of minutes was answered by an actual human being, a Pole, in Poland, who worked for the airline, spoke perfect English and arranged everything in a tick.
Later we had a connection from Dubrovnik through Vienna to Prague on Austrian Airlines. I rang Austrian because the connection seemed too tight. Phone answered in minutes, intelligent, helpful response in flawless English. The flight was delayed and we missed our connection in Vienna. Just as we got to the service desk to see what we could do, a woman from Austrian Airlines approached the desk with our boarding passes all printed out for the next Prague flight a few hours later.
I almost fainted.
It’s a long time since the Spirit of Australia performed like that.
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