No I'm not kidding!!

I decided to take the family for a nice 10 day trip to Bali. We have four young kids, boys aged 2,3 6 and 9, so travel is a bit of a challenge at the best of times, but is manageable. I fly all over the world for business very regularly and am Platinum FF with Qantas, Emirates etc, so have flown with some of the best and the worst airlines over many years across the US, Europe and Asia.

Well lets just say that Jetstar opened my eyes to a non existent level of customer service to such an extent that I began to believe that as a customer I was more of a pest and inconvenience to Jetstar staff than anything else - what a pathetic, lying bunch!
We got to airport on Sunday at 3pm for a 5pm flight to Bali to be told that flight was delayed to 6.30.Sounds ok until you realise this is going to be 6.30am not 6.30pm! All my details were on hand at Jetstar via my booking, but no notification from them, nothing. Despite availability of alternate flights via Darwin, we were not assisted at all, in fact it was completely clear that the check in staff and their arrogant manager had no interest in helping us. So off we go with all 4 kids to the airport hotel to find that the hotel had not been provided with approval to book us in and by the time they had that approval an hour later, there were possibly a hundred people queuing to get a room! The reasons for the flight delay, a mechanical issue which I can accept but the way we were treated - appalling!

So a 3am wake up with 4 young kids to make the supposed 6.30 flight, only to find out its not really leaving at 6.30 and we could have let the kids sleep to a more reasonable hour - again no notification, nothing, just inconvenience and lies.
We eventually got going at 8am, so a 15 hr delay with 4 young kids and having to deal with a team of people who clearly hate what they do, hate who they work for and hate what their company stands for! Well if you think that's the end of the story, its not - our return flight was scheduled for 11pm last night, got the exhausted kids to the airport by 9pm to find out, guess what, flight delay to 3.30am!! Again, no notification, no prior advice, despite checking website just before leaving hotel to ensure everything was on time.

So this time there was a medical emergency on the previous flight which caused a diversion. This happens and is understandable, but why the lack of communication, lies and total lack of desire to help out when there is an issue. Again no assitance to get another flight, they even charged us to use their lounge last night so that my kids didn't have to sleep on the airport floor for 5 bloody hours!!

To top it all, we paid for entertainment ahead of the flight and when we requested a couple of units when the kids woke up they said they had handed them all out - sorry! What a joke, seriously I cannot understand how Jetstar exist, how they can have such a patehtic attitude to their customers and from my perspective how Qantas can allow them to tarnish any good reputation the Qantas goup has built up over the years.

I am not someone to complain lightly, but I can tell you that Jetstar alienated hundreds of customers over those two flights, who will tell all their friends and families so it will be thousands of lost customers and negative impressions. What they clearly fail to see, is that as customers we do understand problems occur and that there can be delays. Its the total lack of care, total disregard and direspect for their customers, particularly where little kids are involved that makes me extremely angry. I will not fly jetstar again and will ensure my staff do not fly jetstar unless there is no other oiption. i will be an ongoing PR nightmare at any opportunity for Jetstar, not because of the way they treated me or my wife, but because of the direspect and discomfort they showed my kids, where they could have very easily have told us the truth helped us out a bit and communicated in such a way whereby we could have planned accordingly.

Jetstar you are a disgrace. I don't know who your CEO is, and don't really care, but he is either incompetent or too busy flying in his private jet to notice that the culture within his organisation sucks and as a result so does Jetstar!