I am one of the passengers that got caught in the QF73 (SYD-SFO) delay on Friday, the plane was delayed by 6 hours and only departed at 8:30pm.
With the exception of constantly changing departure time (it pretty much was updated once every hour so everyone was forced to hang around the terminal), Qantas handled it quite well and everyone is given $30 food voucher each.
But this got me thinking, normally can we expect any compensation (beyond meal/hotel) when the flight is delayed by a significant amount of time? Thankfully the flight did take off that day, I called my TI about what happens if Qantas cancelled the flight and the answer wasn't pretty (I had to cover the excess first, which would probably wipe out anything I could have claimed under the TI).
If it makes any difference, my flight was from MEL-SYD-SFO, so the stopover turned out to be much longer than expected, big thumps up to the Amex lounge in Sydney since they housed quite a few QF27/QF73 passengers stuck that day, so the only thing I ended up losing was the half day that I could have spent in SFO.
(Off topic, there was a few passengers who booked a connecting flight with another non-one world airline..., that really drilled home the point to always book any same day connecting flights on the same ticket)
With the exception of constantly changing departure time (it pretty much was updated once every hour so everyone was forced to hang around the terminal), Qantas handled it quite well and everyone is given $30 food voucher each.
But this got me thinking, normally can we expect any compensation (beyond meal/hotel) when the flight is delayed by a significant amount of time? Thankfully the flight did take off that day, I called my TI about what happens if Qantas cancelled the flight and the answer wasn't pretty (I had to cover the excess first, which would probably wipe out anything I could have claimed under the TI).
If it makes any difference, my flight was from MEL-SYD-SFO, so the stopover turned out to be much longer than expected, big thumps up to the Amex lounge in Sydney since they housed quite a few QF27/QF73 passengers stuck that day, so the only thing I ended up losing was the half day that I could have spent in SFO.
(Off topic, there was a few passengers who booked a connecting flight with another non-one world airline..., that really drilled home the point to always book any same day connecting flights on the same ticket)