Id like to share my experiences recently with the Qantas frequent flyer process. Yes it certainly is a most frustrating experience and Ive wasted hours of time negotiating its vagaries, but im now satisfied with what I eventually ended up with.
After trawling the site trying to find 2 Business class seats to Europe for next June using QF/EK, practically going insane trying to get dates/availabilty/destinations to match up, I finally found the available flights I wanted and I proceeded to book and pay. Everything looked good and because I was using QF/EK, I was only forking out 128,000 points p/p. When I went to progress onto the payment page, I copped the dreaded error message.
I had no choice but to call. I used the call back policy and they rang back after about 3 hours as promised.
The agent was no nonsense but efficient. I gave her all the details of the flights and mentioned the error message.
She booked everything and after a few minutes on hold, she said everything was confirmed and that the points per person was going to be 170,000 !!! I was horrified as it was 40,000 per person extra !!)
I told her I had a screen shot of the previous nights booking and she did not have an answer for the discrepancy except for saying it may have been why I got the error message.
I reluctantly told her to go ahead with the booking as I had to get the flights booked once and for all.
After a few minutes on hold as she finalised the booking, she returned and told me that somehow the points required for the booking had reverted to 128,000 p/p which was music to my ears.
Not sure how/what happened there but I was super glad it did. Maybe the mention of the screen shot
helped. (I was going to write in if ended up being charged 170000 points per person!!)
And the taxes where also reduced from the initial quote as well.
Plus I was not charged a service fee for making a booking over the phone either.
It was frustrating to say the least but im happy with the outcome.