Last month, a good return J fare to New York on QF was on offer but only for a few days. The fare was available for travel commenced by Dec 31 2013. As we were planning to go to NY at the end of the year anyway, we decided to take up the offer and called QF. All good until I could not book our return as the seats for dates we needed in Jan 2014 would not be released for another few days. QF suggested we book a dummy return date and change once the return date we wanted was available. This would have been fine except they wanted $300 person to make the change. This seemed totally unreasonable but there was no way the QF agent was going to budge on this despite both passengers being WP.
I then called an online booking website and asked them what they could do. They assured me that in this situation an airline would normally make the change for no charge and would contact QF the next morning. They called me the next morning. QF had said there was absolutely no way they'd waive the fee but the agent asked me to give them a chance to speak to their QF rep. They did and later that day called to assure me that there would be no charge to change to return to the flight we wanted when available. We finalised the booking with a dummy return date just a few hours before the end of the sale. The booking was amended a few days later with no change fee. The only downside was that the site charges a larger credit card fee than QF.
The next day QF announced the sale was being extended for a few days which would have covered our return dates. We could have just booked directly with QF, avoided all the time and hassle and saved the extra credit card fee.
I know that the QF customer service staff (who I generally find to be very good) is not always given freedom to work outside the 'rules' but this was a ridiculous lack of flexibility.
I then called an online booking website and asked them what they could do. They assured me that in this situation an airline would normally make the change for no charge and would contact QF the next morning. They called me the next morning. QF had said there was absolutely no way they'd waive the fee but the agent asked me to give them a chance to speak to their QF rep. They did and later that day called to assure me that there would be no charge to change to return to the flight we wanted when available. We finalised the booking with a dummy return date just a few hours before the end of the sale. The booking was amended a few days later with no change fee. The only downside was that the site charges a larger credit card fee than QF.
The next day QF announced the sale was being extended for a few days which would have covered our return dates. We could have just booked directly with QF, avoided all the time and hassle and saved the extra credit card fee.
I know that the QF customer service staff (who I generally find to be very good) is not always given freedom to work outside the 'rules' but this was a ridiculous lack of flexibility.
