Air Pacific cancels flights due crook WX at Nandi
A friend of mine had been booked on Air Pacific Melbourne to Nandi departing 0230 Saturday 31 March. He was also booked on connecting Air Pacific flight Nandi to Tarawa which was scheduled to depart a couple of hours after the flight from Melbourne had landed,
Fortuitously, he checked the Air Pacific website six hours before ETD Melbourne (for a check of max baggage allowance) only to discover to his dismay his Air Pacific Melbourne to Nandi flight was cancelled due bad weather hitting Nandi.
Air Pacific had not notified him of this. The website gave no further info. So he tried to contact Air Pacific on their 1800 number and waited one hour holding on to the phone before someone finally came on the blower. Meanwhile he was continually assailed with a honey voiced tape recording saying "the next available agent will be with you shortly" repeated about every 30 seconds in between another recording extolling the pleasures of flying Air Pacific" "Being with you shortly' was bloody nonsense since an hour went by before a live person replied.
This agent said that all flights were now booked solid and no way of getting out of Melbourne for another week due no room on the aircraft. How my friend wished that some one would start Jetstar Fiji to give competition to Air Pacific who seem to have monopoly from flights Nandi to Tarawa.
While talking to the agent, who seemed to have difficulty with bookings and getting herself thoroughly mixed up on what dates and what flights had been cancelled, suddenly the bloody landline phone went dead indicating presumably that someone had inadvertently cut him off half-way from trying to get information on available flights into and out of Nandi.
He could hardly believe his rotten luck So he was forced to start the process all over - called the 1800 AirPac number and this time sat twiddling his thumbs and waited over 1.5 hours listening to this infernal Air Pacific advertising blurb and hanging on hoping to get a human on the blower. Eventually someone came on and told my friend that such was the problem caused by the flight cancellations everyone was on the 1800 number trying to book on anything that could get them to Fiji and on to Tarawa.
The end result was a wait of one week in Melbourne like it or lump it - unless another airline was tried. Even then Air Pacific was still the monopoly operator Nandi to Tarawa.
In short my mate was of the considered opinion that Air Pacific have a serious communication problem when things go wrong suddenly. To wait over 1.5 hours to get a human to answer the 1800 number is bad enough but surely Air Pacific should have the organisation to cover all bases when flights get disrupted. Well - they don't. The worst part was that they apparently make no attempt to contact ticket holders when really serious delays occur. I would expect this in Third World airlines but not so close to Australia as Fiji. Anyone else struck this sort of incompetency with that airline?