I guess you're referring to other comments. I wasn't complaining about fares. I did write that some people out there have blamed Joyce in particular for high air fares and noted that's ridiculous - that was really the only thing I commented about fares tbh. I'm not quite sure why the focus on this tbh.
As for cost cutting - cost cutting isn't only related to income from airfares o course. For example, outsourcing under the wing functions at domestic locations (a real red button issue for many), is about the company bottom line for sure. Of course it's not just QF that go through the insourcing/outsourcing merry-go-round - it happens in IT in a very cyclical nature I've noticed over the years. Anyway that's just an example - and those decisions have absolutely been made with an eye to the then current situation of covid (where there was bugger all revenue of course) but others have been much longer in the making.
I would agree on some (as with the outsourcing example I mentioned) but others have been much longer term. I mentioned IT above - the IT situation has been poor for LONG before covid. Functionality of peers over say the last 10 years have gone well past QF and more the point mostly just work. Is UA,AC , AA, VA, SQ or any of the others perfect? No. Are many of them better? oh yes.
but more to the point we've long had to put up with problems caused by real kludges to make work - take flight credits as a prime example. How difficult are those (and travelpasses still do not seem to be a default despite their introduction a few years ago - and they are great by the way). Look at the fact that you have to use one or another search engine to book things on the website, and they're not always consistent. Look at the lack of many partner reward availability online(if it's there I mean) - some others can book just about all partners directly and without issue and manage the bookings all online or via app as it's supposed to be. Why do some even QF only bookings go into a ticketing black hole (a.k.a the far queue) and require manual intervention? so on and so forth. This has been going on for a very long time. Have there been improvements over time - yes, there's been some things fixed, some functionality added and so on - but some very major, well known issues, have been those for a very long time with seemingly little action to us as customers. However go through this forum and look at all the "is the website down again?" type threads? or the random errors when doing searches or trying to book tickets. We all can accept things go wrong from time to time - but with QF it's become a new normal and many of us accept these things as part of the deal.. learn to work with it or be patient (or go elsewhere) when really they shouldn't be - or at the very least to be a very low incidence. Tie in to what agents get to work with, including CS offshore where clearly they are not enabled (or possibly empowered) to fix seemingly simple things - or what should be - and I wonder how much of this is related to technology as much as training. I saw just today a P1 member in a forum commenting that they had not gotten their passes in their account as usual and chasing up for weeks as they wanted to gift to traveling family to use Flounge. Seemingly noody within CS, VIP Team or whoever could apparently sort this out over a long course of time, and this member is left without the ability to do what they wanted with their entitlement. Surely a simple thing to resolve.. but apparently way too hard. why?
That's just one area that is core to QF's operations that has seemingly systemic issues. There are many others - customer service training (fine to outsource your call centres if you will, but not when they can cause more problems for some by poor information, screwing up booking changes and so on - and sure, per x thousand calls, the problems caused may statistically be small - but again look here for so many stories of problems). Every poor experience adds to bad impressions, and those messages spread. It goes to reputation.
Yes, VH thinks things like the performance issues have largely been fixed (must not have seen the 380's OTP recently
) and things are going grea - if that's the general view of the CEO-elect, then this is a big worry imo if they can't recognise there are ongoing issues that affect real paying customers. One can pull examples of things that are better to prove a point sure (eg bag delivery) but there are other things that have been problematic for far longer than covid, and if they can't see that these are real then things will bubble along as they will I guess.
And I won't repeat my comments about staff morale and treatment I made earlier.
Look, don't get me wrong, QF in the main run a pretty reliable service. I have no concern getting on a QF aircraft and have a reasonable idea of what I'll get service wise. That's fine. Where things go wrong at many steps of the travel experience - from booking to travel - it's where the airline needs to improve in many areas - by sorting out things like technology so booking issues don't occur in the first place, so that a change to a rewards booking doesn't cancel out due to non ticketing etc, and that pax feel looked after when things go badly.
It's fair to blame the pandemic for some issues - specially with how much money QF (as with all other airlines bar probably QR) were leaking for 2+ years and that has had a huge impact on financials and the ability to do many things that have probably been on the to-do list.. but there are other things and problems that have been brewing for far longer imo.
