More Qantas...

This on Wednesday last week in response to my original complaint which you can find by clicking here:

Dear Mr Dikkii,

Thank you for your email and your very considered feedback.

I can let you know, that in accordance with feedback from many of our customers, we serve a UHT full fat homgenised (sic) milk with beverages.

With breakfast cereal we serve a "slightly fat reduced" milk.

I hope I have clarified this for you.

Kind regards

Virginia Hargreaves

Customer Care Executive

I've only just dashed off my response:

Dear Ms Hargreaves,

Thank you for your response.  I’m not certain that things have been clarified, but I do appreciate your extremely prompt response.

I am certain that you probably get all manner of complaints in your position.  I’m sure that you’re very good at responding to them.  But, without meaning to tell you how to do your job, please allow me to tell you how to do your job.

Firstly, when responding to a complaint about low fat milk being served with muesli, try to refrain from rubbing your complainant’s nose in it by boasting about other occasions where full cream milk (or “full fat” as you erroneously refer to it) is served.

I do entertain the possibility that you have confused me with another passenger’s concerns.  In this case, I should remind you that this can often be perceived by the complainant as somewhat maddening.

Secondly, please add me to the ‘many’ that support having “full fat” milk with their beverage.  I support this.  Whilst I suspect that you meant to appeal to popular support in the following sentence, and whilst your overdue reduction of ‘everybody’ to ‘many people’ was probably more accurate, I eagerly await Qantas’ next response, which I suspect will reduce this further to ‘would you believe...’ and be sent from the email box of Maxwell Smart. 

In closing, please bring back full cream milk to have with cereal and leave low fat milk for those who want it.  Kthxbai.

Yours sincerely, 

Dikkii.

That should be the end of that.

Complaint to Qantas

Oh look: It's a complaint to Qantas again.

This one went off to Qantas this morning and relates to flights I took with them quite recently.


Truthfully, I don't know why I fly with them anymore.  Oh that's right: Company policy.  But their slashing of value with respect to in-flight catering shouldn't really go unchecked for too much longer.

Folks, if you don't complain about this continual erosion of what is stuff that you should expect, Qantas will continue to turn the Qantas brand into an international joke.  I say this as a former shareholder.

Dear Sir/Madam,

I have a complaint for you.  Firstly, however, I ask you to consider how you would normally answer if someone comes up to you right now and were to ask, ‘Hey, I’m going out for a coffee.  Do you want one?’

If you would normally answer, ‘a skinny latte for me, please,’ or for any kind of caffeinated beverage with low fat milk, I respectfully ask that this complaint be passed on to someone who still has their tastebuds intact.  If you normally ask that person going off to the cafe for a non-caffeinated beverage with low-fat milk, I strongly urge you to seek help.

Yesterday, as I was on the flight to Sydney out of Tullamarine at the ungodly time of 0630 hours, I was reminded of a particular section of the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia, section 116.  This is the section that prohibits the Commonwealth from favouring one religion over another, and is often quoted by naive Australians as evidence that Australia is secular.  Usually, when they say this, they turn a blind eye to our public holidays that are structured around religious celebrations, as well as those other aspects of public life where religion, more specifically, mainstream Christianity, is forced upon us lesser religious folk, not to mention kiddies who are unable to opt out of such ‘secular’ programs as religious education and chaplaincy programmes that feature in taxpayer funded schools of all persuasions.

But it is not religion that I write to you about, even though I draw this parallel.

Yesterday, upon the flight, I was prompted to think about religion and its all invasive hydra of heads when I was served breakfast on my flight, which consisted of muesli and a small bottle of a strange concoction from Pura, called ‘Skimmer’.

Upon closer inspection, it appeared to be one of those aforementioned low-fat milk products that taste as if someone spat in a bowl of water and stirred it around a bit.

I asked the flight attendant that surely, there had been some mistake, and could I have some full cream milk instead?

I have to hand it to the professionalism of your flight attendant.  His poker face did not waver one bit as he responded with a straight bat, that they didn’t serve full cream milk on Qantas flights anymore, as, ‘Everyone complained that they wanted low fat milk.’

I very much expected the late and very much missed Leslie Nielsen to put his head out of the cockpit and add that if it wasn’t too much to ask, could I stop calling the flight attendant, “Shirley”?

But I do have to call ‘bollocks!’ on this suggestion.  The very notion that ‘Everyone’ called Qantas demanding low fat milk would be outrageous, if it wasn’t for the hilarity that ensues when one considers the frankly unbelievable situation that one might be presented with, should this have ever occurred.  Ignoring the very real problem that the telecommunications of a small to medium-sized country would be quickly rendered out-of-order by the phoning going on, imagine every car on the road coming to a complete standstill as everyone pulls over and attempts to contact Qantas in their attempt to enforce low fat milk on everyone.

In fact, it is only in this unlikely (and totally newsworthy) situation in which I might be prepared to forgive you for serving me up the bottled snot that you think passes for milk in this day and age.  And whilst I confess to not watching the news all the time, I think I would have heard of seven billion people choking Qantas’ switchboard with calls.

I should point out that the last person I heard trying to convince me that absolutely everyone in the whole, wide world were trying to do something like this, I didn’t believe it then, and I’m pretty sure that the decline in Vanessa Amorosi’s career is no coincidence.

I think that I would have a credible hypothesis that it was not ‘everybody’, but a vocal bunch of idiots who are very much in the minority, not unlike the likes of Jim Wallace, Cardinal Pell or Archbishop Jensen.  And just like the powerbrokers in the major political parties, you listen to them like the gullible schmucks they are, possibly even believing the rubbish about ‘That’s the Kool-Aid that people drink these days.’

Listen, I remember the days where every flight between Melbourne and Sydney had a hot meal.  I didn’t complain when you did away with the hot breakfast which was, unlike most plane food, a good feed of scrambled eggs, sausage and either mushrooms or tomato.  I didn’t complain when you limited hot meals on this sector to flights departing between 6:00 and 6:05 PM on Mondays through Wednesdays and I certainly didn’t complain when meals became a Byron Bay cookie and a bottle of water.  I didn’t complain either, when your Bega Tasty cheese and Jatz combo went from three Jatz crackers to two, nor did I complain when your meat and salad panini halved in size, as it appeared to have done on my return flight back to Melbourne, last night.

See, I bet that every time you get a new manager in to look after this area, the first thing that they do is look at their KPIs and say, ‘How do I slash costs?’  Then, they slash what is provided to the punters in the interest of saving costs.  This, dear reader, is reducing what mums and dads call ‘value’ and every time you erode this, it does not go unnoticed.  There would have been close to hundreds of meetings over the past few years where the manager in charge of in-flight catering makes a presentation to the executive of the division and discusses the savings that have taken place.  I can almost visualise the exact moment when that manager would have puffed out his chest with pride, looked the executive square in the eye and said, ‘We slashed at our Jatz crackers and saved 10 million dollars.  It was an heroic battle, but Qantas passengers should only have two Jatz crackers, don’t you think?  Three Jatz crackers should have been seen as the aesthetic deformity that it was.’  And I can almost feel the thump of the executive’s hand coming down on the manager’s back amidst the mutual backslapping that would have then occurred.  Don’t even begin to discuss what kind of bonus was paid for this atrocity that was committed in the name of customer service.

It’s about time that someone did let you know that that you’ve crossed a line, because eventually, you’ll claim that ‘everyone’ wanted no pork products, when in reality it was a few overly pious religious scholars, or that I’m no longer able to order sugar with my coffee, because ‘everyone’ wanted to have Equal® instead.  The way things are going, we’re probably going to have gluten-free food forced on us by you by the end of the year thanks to fatuous wankers who think that gluten kills puppies.  Wake up to yourselves.

I would very much like this fixed.  Low fat milk should remain an option, like kosher, halal, Atkins and gluten-free, but full cream milk should be, just like it is in the real world, which you clearly don’t inhabit, the default.

Yours sincerely,

Dikkii.

Again, I doubt that I'll get a response.

Qantas? JetStar? Who the f@$%... Part 2

This is Part 2.

Part 1 is here.

Took them a while, but Qantas eventually replied to my complaint:

Dear Dikkii


Thank you for taking the time to provide us with your first hand experience of our codeshare flights to Bangkok and back to Melbourne, operated by Jetstar.

Qantas is committed to acting on what our customers tell us and although I can't answer you in detail, I can assure you that I have logged your feedback in our database. We run a continuous improvement program, which uses this feedback to help resolve problems and improve our product and service. Your feedback will be an invaluable input to that improvement process.

Although I can not respond to you with any further information, please be assured that I have provided your feedback to the management of the area responsible, so that they too can learn from your experience.

We value your support as a Frequent Flyer member and I hope you will give us the opportunity to show you Qantas at its best by flying with us again soon.


Yours sincerely


Brigitte Anttilla
Customer Care Executive
Qantas Airways Ltd

Fairly standard stuff - I wouldn't be surprised if Brigitte just cut and pasted from a form letter. I'm not really interested in pursuing this unless I hear from a lot of people who've had the same thing happen to them

In which case it could be a job for the trashy current affairs shows. I've always wanted to meet Anna Coren.

But I will go on record to say that I have no confidence in Qantas' code-sharing arrangements. Nor anyone else's for that matter, especially where a budget airline is used in place of a full-service one.

Disclosure: This blogger owns shares in Qantas.

Qantas? JetStar? Who the f@$% am I flying with?

Just a short missive to Qantas about a flight experience I had with them recently. I must admit, I wasn't exactly "on" when I wrote this, and anger tends to dissipate over time.

Rule number 1 when writing a good complaint: Write it as soon as you possibly can. Anger is a creative force.

Dear Sir/Madam,

I wanted to bring to your attention a mild dissatisfaction that I had recently with flights bearing your flight numbers.

Recently, my wife and I flew from Tullamarine to Bangkok. We were advised when we booked the flights that these would be on JetStar, and this is perfectly understandable, given that it makes perfect business sense to operate code-sharing arrangements.

Our problems, however, started there.

Whilst our flights were on JetStar planes, the flight numbers we were given started with QF, meaning that for all intents and purposes, they were Qantas flights.

So you can imagine our surprise when we took our seats to find that all the normal things that we would expect on a Qantas flight were not there. On Qantas flights, we expect to find meal services, drinks as well as a blanket and pillow.

It, therefore, came as a bit of a rude shock to us to find that we had to pay extra for these on the flight. This is not what one expects when flying what is expected to be a Qantas flight.

While I am doing my best in this not to harp on about what is expected when operating a code-sharing agreement, the following should be noted: It is the duty of Qantas to ensure that where a code-sharing arrangement exists, an equivalent level of service is received by the paying passengers. The fact that JetStar was operating the service should in no way be any different than if the flight was operated by British Airways, Aer Lingus or Burkina Faso Air.

On top of this, at the end of the flight when we went to try to get food, we were told that this was for passengers who had ordered this in advance and that there was nothing for any other passengers, even if they were prepared to pay.

Given all this, we decided to pre-order for our return flight, and were pleased with the results, however as we were, as has been mentioned before, flying what was in effect a Qantas flight, this should not have been necessary.

JetStar operates clean, new planes with what is probably the most attractive cabin staff I’ve ever seen. This says more about JetStar’s recruitment policies than it does about me, but they were competent and did their jobs with a smile. It is a shame, then, that Qantas doesn’t ensure that JetStar provides the rest of the package.

Given that Qantas owns JetStar, one would think that you are in a box seat to ensure that Qantas passengers on JetStar flights are treated with an equivalent level of service to what they would be if they were on a Qantas flight. This would be a no-brainer with any other company where this sort of thing exists.

I hope that this email has been of some assistance. Please feel free to contact me if you require further information.

Yours sincerely, Dikkii.

Oh well, I'll see what I get back.

Disclosure: This blogger owns shares in Qantas.