The big wait
Frustrating Times
A local airline customer has been kept waiting on the phone, to make a booking enquiry, for almost 3 hours.
The customer who doesn’t wish to be named says the total time recorded on her mobile phone, when Qantas finally answered was 2 hours 49 minutes 39 seconds which Newsport verified while the call was being made.
“This is just not on” said the woman “we’re told to travel domestically and support the airlines after Covid, and this is what you experience? This is our national carrier for goodness’ sake”
And the others?
To see if a similar delay was happening with other domestic airlines Newsport put in calls to customer lines at Virgin and Jetstar, a subsidiary of Qantas.
Virgin took 1 min 16 seconds to answer and Jetstar 4 mins 38 seconds.
Newsport contacted Qantas media to enquire about the excessive wait time experienced and was told by a spokesperson
“Recent COVID outbreaks have driven a huge spike in calls from customers which has meant our customers have been experiencing longer wait times, which we sincerely apologise for, we’ve trained hundreds of new agents and continue to hire and train more so we can reduce wait times as much as possible”
Dropouts
The airline is also addressing call dropouts that have been frustrating people especially when they’ve already been on the phone for an extended period.
The Qantas media spokesperson went on to say, “we are also introducing new processes around call backs to make sure our operators are contacting customers if a call drops out.”
Qantas asked Newsport to publish four points they wanted to get across to their customers.
- Since the start of the pandemic, we have processed more than 4 million changes to customer bookings whether that’s moving flights, giving refunds, or providing flight vouchers.
- More than 90 per cent of customers who have been disrupted as a result of changing border restrictions have been able to change their flight online, while more than 80 per cent of customers have redeemed their flight credits online.
- Customers can use Manage my Booking to change or cancel their flight, use a flight voucher to make a booking or purchase extra legroom. (most common enquiries).
- We have invested in new technology over COVID to make our call centre more flexible and easier to scale up and down we hope to have this in place in the coming months.
All major internal carriers are hoping Australians will continue to explore their own country and support tourism which has been left battered by the Covid Pandemic.