Qantas's call centre is beyond bad.
My parents needed to change date of an international Classic Award booking. They were unable to do this online as it had originally been booked pre-covid.
Every call to QF call centre was a hold for at least 3 hours, then the call would just be cut.
My parents and my brother who are in Australia, and myself (UK based) took it in turns over a 7 day period to attempt to reach someone
Finally, on one of my attempts after a 5 hour hold I got through to an agent in Capetown.
She didn't have a clue how to deal with the issue. There was a dog barking and a baby crying and people laughing and joking in the background.
I talked her through it. She repeatedly put me on hold to seek assistance from a supervisor. We found available flights on the chosen date. She made the change, but half way through the call the call cut out and I was taken to a customer experience survey.
After a further 12 attempts to reach an agent, I advised my parents to email QANTAS directly via an email address for a European Qantas office.
They replied almost instantly, with the bad news that the agent hadn't completed the date change properly and that she had failed to do what was necessary.
After several more attempts, I called QANTAS at 11pm UK time to resolve once and for all. I was "on hold". I fell asleep. I woke up at 8am the following day (9 hours later) - I was still on hold.
Kept in communication with the European contact we had established via email who couldn't get into make changes to the booking due to the errors the phone agent had made..
Having now spent 71 hours in total on hold to Qantas.
We gave up.
My parents cancelled their flight, and purchased a new reward flight from scratch. The original had been booked before the increase in required points, so the new flights cost more points.
They are still awaiting the recredit of points and refund of taxes/charges and charges from the initial flight.
In response to the awful customer service, I cancelled 48 LHR-SYD QF business class flights I had booked for business colleagues over the next 12 months, valued at nearly AU$350k.
I rebooked these flights on UNITED via the USA.
As a measure, I decided to phone the United call centre out of curiosity, to ask about one of the flights.
There was one simple set of options to select from, and following my selection, my call was answered after 2 rings, and dealt with thoroughly.
Thank you United for restoring my faith in the airline industry.
Qantas customer service is a national embarassment.
