Will Australia ever have a good airline again?
 

I am sure even the Qantas crews must despair at just how far has Qantas fallen from the days it was seen as a bit more reliable and efficient than the others. As posted a couple of months ago, flew back into Sydney International terminal when the airport was quite busy. Qantas transit was closed no explanation and hundreds of weary travelers lined up.. Staff member walked by but couldn't organize busses after an hour of arm waving. Many of the self check-in machines were weren't working. No staff to help. Domestic check-in lines for international transit were very long and many missed their flights while a Qantas staff member roamed around telling the line to keep moving as if it weren't the lack of check in staff that was the problem. Only 4 check-in staff on duty and i stood behind one who took 25 minutes to check one guy in because there was a dispute over his cabin bagged being 2kg over the limit...the Qantas check-in was more belligerent than the passenger.

Now it's CEO is blaming passengers for the long lines because they aren't "match-fit" and getting their laptops out: https://www.news.com.au/travel/trave...07eda47882b65e

Meanwhile passengers are showing up 4 hours early and still missing their flights. https://www.reddit.com/r/australia/c...rport_4_hours/

Obviously Sydney Airports is responsible for a lot of this. God knows a $35 billion company can't afford too have too many security staff on the cheapest tenderers payroll at $25 an hour or whatever they make. But between SAC, Qantas and Border Force, Sydney Airport is an embarrassment to Australia. The "Spirit of Australia" must be a penny pinching, bureaucratic, over-regulated excrement fight. I hope Qantas gets better, i know a lot of people are prepared to pay a bit more to get a more premium service even if that means just less flights cancelled for "technical" or "operational" reasons, but right now we have a whole lot of budget airlines with no point of difference between them.

Nothing will change until the ceo is removed.
The board isn’t prepared to do that.
Every aspect of the operation, bar the Zumba classes in the street, are a complete cluster.

Don't blame the frontline staff, be it contractors, part timers or whatever's left of qantas experience'd staff they are all doing the best they can. blame the managers and exec's who made this mess, all those meetings and they counldn't of planned for this mess, should just fire the lot cant even organsise a chook raffle too busy sipping latte's between zumba yoga classes at HQ.

Of course many front line staff are doing their best under terrible conditions. But honestly, some of them were rude and had an air of auditioning for the next "Airport" TV series. "Look how i stand up to this difficult passenger who is questioning my authority" . Border Force in Sydney...never seen such a lazy bunch of goons in paramilitary gear (for what reason exactly do they need jackboots and overalls in an airport? It is not Kiev). Only 4 Border Goons on the terminals processing passengers, maybe half a dozen watching the line snake out into the halls. Line went for well over an hour while we listened to Covid safe messages telling us to keep distance. But Qantas ground set-up incompetency took the day that day. It has got worse rather than better obviously.

The whole industry has basically been outsourced in the last two years, the trade off for cheaper contracts is poorer service. Executives will bank the saving and take the bonus for improvements on the balance sheet, customer scores will start to disappear from KPIs as service heads south.

It will get to the point one day in that the only people on the airlines payroll in the whole airport is the two pilots. Every other function will be outsourced. Your local airport is now just one giant minimum wage outsourced machine. Look at Bonza, taking it to new levels, outsourcing the whole thing including pilots and cabin crew, to CAE. Only people on the Bonza payroll is a few dozen staff based at the Sunny Coast HQ. Pilots will probably go back in house later on when cracks start to appear.

'Tis all 'Sco-Mo's' fault................Albanese will fixxit !!

Cheers

Ah, but which airline?

How is SYD responsible for QF attitude and staffing, ABF attitude and staffing? The security problem is across the industry. A lot of screeners etc were stood down when covid destroyed the industry. A lot of them have moved on to greener pastures and won't come back. Strangely enough, there's not a lot of interest from any one else. It takes a while to source someone, train them to competency (believe it or not, it's not actually easy to be a screener) in the numbers you need to cope with the sudden increase in capacity the airlines threw in once borders opened. Also it seems every new flight the airlines added was within a minute or two of a previous one.. The scheduling is ridiculous. Way over capacity at peak, then almost nothing for hours.

That is the truth in a nutshell. All they do is half heartedly apologise because it makes them feel good & read excuse number 2 or 3 from their list.
They have no problem telling us how they are working hard to cut wait times etc etc but in reality they have got rid of most of the people who really cared & now all they have to deal with is a bunch of contract companies who pay peanuts & the result is now being felt by the paying passenger who in days gone by received pretty good service but now are just filling the wallets of the managers & exec's who as you say sip on lattes & dream up excuse after excuse

Unobtomium is right on the money, all the Frontline staff are doing their best, we are just desperately short in many areas, especially Engineering- who have thought letting up to 50% of some bases Engineers leave on VR would have a flow on effect?...not the World's Best Management , that's for sure.
Swissport are apparently short around 400 baggage handlers, when you pay crap wages what do you expect?
The queues for Security were out the door about 5 weeks ago, as the number of pax exploded over the last 4 weeks nothing was done.

Qantas Management were never stood down over the last 2 years, unlike most of their operational staff (or what's left of them), they have had 2 years to prepare for the post C19 rebound, but "it's not our fault, it's the customers".
Qantas Management never make mistakes, it's always someone else's fault- HK Jetstar, hows that going?
Until there is a broom through Coward St (how appropriate), nothing will change.

Recent experience suggests they are playing a new adventure game with random pax who choose to fly with them. It seems to go like this: We'll fly you to your destination(s), but we’ll somehow make sure your luggage is not put on the same flight as you are; you can then go through the interesting game of “where’s my baggage?” whilst we try to establish where we've lost it.

In our recent example it's taken nearly three days after the passenger waited forlornly - and eventually in vain - at the carousel at the destination EU airport for one case to arrive in the destination country. It was established that it was still back in SYD! It was finally delivered at the passenger’s overseas address somewhere around 120+ hours after it was checked in at the Australian departure desk with the reassuring "Your bags are checked right through to xxxx" .

They also managed a two day delay with the same bag on the earlier trip from LHR to Oz, but there was a valid and understandable reason for that, and to everyone’s credit, it did eventually arrive at the Oz address within a couple days. There is no such acceptable reason for the second “loss”, or the subsequent tardiness in getting the bag to its intended destination other than complete incompetence and/or a flawed system.

This happened to a Gold Pass Frequent Flyer and member of the Q Club - what confidence can an ordinary cattle class traveller muster from this sequence of events?

Totally agree. I was at the gate,on time, with a boarding pass and some fellow passengers behind me, only to be told,oh sorry, we thought you were going to miss your flight, so we booked you on the next one. I had to stand there while the remaining passengers boarded and the aircraft pushed back.

The next one was 12 hours later and on jetstar. No help given,just expected to sit at the airport for 12 hours, and this was after just coming off a 17hour flight.

Pathetic, and I do blame the frontline staff, the attitude of "not my problem, too bad" was infuriating. And to top it off they lost my bags.

It's not just Australia. It's the school holiday season in the UK and I can tell you it's unbelievably chaotic. I am dreading Easter... Bear in mind the UK has been effectively "ops normal" for many months now. We don't even need to submit any PLFs or do any rip off testing. To get through security at Manchester, it's taking passengers 2-3 hours. British Airways at T5 last weekend was a mess. ATC are actually issuing CTOTs again causing delays. My bag didn't make the flight from LHR to LIS. It didn't get to me for 48 hours. I was glad I was doing ground instructor work and not flying. (A big shout out to the Apple AirTag, I knew where my bag was before BA could tell me).
I'm a gold member with British Airways too. Oh, I did get an apology but that didn't really cut it to be honest.
Both British Airways and easyJet have cancelled hundreds of flights citing COVID illness but now they are admitting that there is a severe staffing issue. They cut heavily in 2020 and have failed to attract them back.
Pilots are not turning up for initial courses (better offers elsewhere) and the cabin crew are walking off the job for the same reason.

Well Redsnail has beaten me too it in pointing out this is not just a Australian thing. he UK at resent is a total Foxtrot Uniform.

Outsourcing is never a good idea and when organisations do it to the point of dependence and something goes wrong chaos ensues. Add in Brexit and government who are alternately corrupt and incompetent who thought getting rid of all Covid restrictions was a good idea when it lead to almost 10% of the country being off sick and you have the chaos that is Easter travel from UK.

Add in the 'management factor ' common to BA and Qantas where marketing -making money is good and operations costing money is bad and a you get a situation where thousands of BA exec club members are getting emails saying along the lines of its April its spring its time to fly at a time when the media is full of pictures and horror stories from UK airports. No coordination because senior management either don't care or don't understand anything and few, if any, ever came up on a career path that exposed them to the complexities of whats involved in running something like a major airline .and just manage by numbers.

Apart from all the outsourcing and trimming to increase the management profit sharing the airline industry in general has been going down hill for a few decades. Once a competitive market by way of service offered it is now really a bus travel style experience. Interestingly enough very similar to banks where service was the way banks once gained a customer. When the techo aged arrived and pay was deposited direct into a bank account we lost being treated like a customer and like the airlines we are just numbers. Airlines like Singapore Airlines and Cathay 15 +years ago had superior service all around.

When will we have a good airline again?

Never while we have CEOs who are so delusional that they blame the passengers for the delays and chaos when the the true problem is the entire system is based on the best case scenario materialising all day, every day. He didn’t even have the gall to blame the contractors! When things go even a millimetre off the straight and narrow the operation goes into gridlock. Bays unavailable, caterers catering flights that should have left an hour ago, baggage handlers throwing an entire load by themselves because a few people call in sick…the list goes on. I can only hold out hope that some hipster with an MBA is seen sprinting to some CEOs office having had a moment of inspiration where we live in a world with service and quality at its core. I doubt it though, you can’t make money with happy customers.

The only thing not suffering is their fat wallets & the back slapping as they convince each other what a great job they are doing.

Until a time that management actually want to run an airline this will be the new normal. There needs to be a complete restructure in the way management are remunerated for this to occur as the current system actually incentivises management to destroy their own business. This is everywhere in airlines at the moment and is then compounded by monopoly airports where they are then incentivised by poor service. The more delays and inconvenience the airport causes the more money they make.

and when we take a gaze at how this corporate strategy has become so ubiquitous, we see a few decades of politicians who watch the polling and metrics only. No leadership at all from the top.

Border Farce has been the worst 'reform' by any government in our history. It has virtually destroyed the old CIQ set up with people being moved from one workplace to another, ending up at an airport making decisions about what paperwork is required for an aircraft departure and not knowing the difference in the law regarding charter versus scheduled and causing delays, people not knowing what they're doing, priceless botanical specimens borrowed from France that were collected by La Perouse being burned on arrival in Queensland by Border Farce/Agriculture because they can't frigging read a label (some species have become extinct locally so the seeds were the last examples) and I remember a Four Corners program I think that had a story where a German gun seller detected suspicious activity by a purchaser in Australia and warned BF multiple times. They ignored the warnings and as a result, something like parts for 500 Glock automatic pistols were imported which the State Police in various jurisdictions then had to clean up the mess for - it would have to be a textbook example of taking something that worked and completely and utterly f-cking it up.

What do we expect though, from a PM who invented BF at the time who that thought it was a good idea to re-introduce knighthoods then give one to a member of the royal family?? You know, the same one who coined 'Team Australia'.