Qantas Ticketing Failure - Award booking cancelled

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mad_atta

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On 5/3/18 after waiting for 1.5hr on the phone we finally booked our flight from Sydney to HongKong, then return from taiwan to Sydney. We received our booking confirmation and hang up the phone. We immediately checked the online account and confirmed the booking is correct (just in case the lady misspelled our name or anything). After five mins I checked our booking again to enter passport details and realised our booking was gone! As in it disappeared completely. I was so confused as I saw it a moment ago.

I quickly called my husband to log in again using his laptop and to our shock we got a brand new booking ID! And to a completely different country! We were so confused as how this could of happened and we realised we were not getting our original booking back as the money taken from my credit card was more than what was quoted! I called back at 11:30 midnight to follow up and to our luck waited another hour. We were told they couldn't do anything at the moment as the flight was with Cathy pacific.

The following days we called six times with no one able to fix the booking or offer explanations. I finally got sick of it and asked to speak to a manager who told me it looks like their staff thought we wanted a return flight from Sydney to Taiwan hence she changed our flight. I told the manager if the operator was confused or unsure why not call us?! Why would you cancel someone's flight and not even tell them? I even said check the voice recording on three occasions I said sydney to Hong Kong only. I never said I wanted a return flight.

As I spent literally 10 hours try to sort out their mistake I asked to get compensation. The manager promised us valet parking as a good will gesture which we accepted. But after one months we never got the promised Parking voucher. I called today only to be told it was rejected! I was very angry as no one even bother telling us we not gonna get the compensation and instead they changed it to pitiful 2000 pts! You gotta be kidding me right! 2000 pts equals to $10 and I wasted so much time calling and now I have to call to follow up on a compensation. And thr funny thing was we got a call to confirm we wanted thr parking voucher the dat after I spoke to the manager.

I now would like ask for possible suggestions on email of senior staff as the operator on the phone couldn't help me and their contact centre is useless as well. We were lucky I rechecked the booking straight away otherwise we will get a lucky surprise when we travel!

To the original poster, you have my sympathy - and this sounds quite similar to a recent, hugely frustrating experience that I also had with Qantas, which interestingly enough also involved booking flights on Cathay Pacific from Taipei to Sydney via Hong Kong, using the call centre (and yes, I got Johannesburg for every one of the 7 or 8 calls I had to make to finally get my flights ticketed).

In case you're wondering why I booked via the call centre, it's because for some bizarre reason you can't book one way award flights from Taipei to Australia via the Qantas site. You can book a round trip (or, as it happens, a multi city) than involves the return trip from Taipei, but you can't buy that alone - the website gives you an error message along the lines that "These cities are not available on the classic flight rewards."

The short version of my story is that I found availability online by searching for round trip flights, then rang Qantas and in what seemed like a normal and fairly efficient call (albeit with a ~45minute wait to get connected) my flights were found, confirmed and sent for ticketing (which will happen within 24 hours but usually much less). I could see the booking appear in my account, and I could also view it on the Cathay site, so all seemed well... except that it never got ticketed. I called them back after a few days, pointing out that it wasn't ticketed, and was assured that they had found the problem and resubmitted it for ticketing, and the agent even said he'd personally keep an eye on the booking and let me know if there was a problem.

A few hours later there was indeed a problem - the booking just vanished completely from both QF and CX sites. I know this only because I looked online to check, not because there was any notification. A QFF phone agent confirmed that it was cancelled by Cathay due to not being ticketed, but any suggestion that QF should take responsibility for their own mistake was met with complete incomprehension.

In the meantime, I'd made lots of other travel arrangements around my supposedly confirmed flights (which were now only just over a week away) so was in a bit of a pickle. QFF in due course made a new award booking for me but with a much longer layover in HKG, which would force me to take a half day of leave, saying there was no availability on my original HKG-SYD flight. It was only after getting off the phone that I thought to check that online, to discover there was indeed availability, so called back requesting that only to be told yes there was availability but I'd have to pay a change fee to switch flights - to reinstate the original flight cancelled due to QFF's incompetence.

The saga goes on, but suffice to say it took three more calls to get the right flights actually ticketed, only just missing yet another ticketing deadline from Cathay Pacific. All told I spent at least 8 hours either on the phone to QFF, on hold, or waiting to be connected. I submitted a complaint about 10 days ago (at that point I had still not been successfully rebooked onto the right flights) but have heard nothing.

Although the Jo'burg agents were consistently polite, their level of technical aptitude and the extent to which they're empowered (or encouraged) to take ownership of and solve problems really does seem to be low. Or is it just that Qantas really doesn't want us to be flying Cathay?

On the whole I'm a fan of Qantas but this was by far the most frustrating set of encounters with airline customer service that I've had in years - and believe me I've had a few.
 
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Hmmm I'm no fare rules expert but I wonder if this is the same "legendary" married-segments controls that CX (used to?) implement on QFF awards from years back?

I can't recall the old forum threads but distinctly recall it being a major concern for me while booking a CX-to-CX flight transitting HKG using QFF. Managed it in the end but it wasn't via QFF.
 
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To anyone wondering why my post refers to the 'original poster', I was actually replying to this thread:
Qantas staff cancelled my flight and rebooked it to a new country!
However the moderators seem to have decided to move it to its own new thread. Seems odd to me but as someone who generally lurks rather than posts on AFF, if that's how things are done here then OK.

Hmmm I'm no fare rules expert but I wonder if this is the same "legendary" married-segments controls that CX (used to?) implement on QFF awards from years back?

I can't recall the old forum threads but distinctly recall it being a major concern for me while booking a CX-to-CX flight transitting HKG using QFF. Managed it in the end but it wasn't via QFF.

The agent who finally sorted this out for me did mention that they were battling with married segments. That was after the first one cancelled and I was trying to rebook, and by that point I was running pretty low on my belief in what QFF agents told me as the reasons why things weren't happening.

I didn't realise that this was a recurring problem. Seems bizarre for a major oneworld partner. Guess I should do some googling...
 
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