Subject: A Jetstar horror story
Planned to leave Auckland for Sydney Saturday 16th January.
Booked for 1420 hrs
Jetstar Message received at 1240 flight was delayed until 1530 then further Continually delayed Boarded 1645 Disembarked 1715 Misdirected to wrong baggage carousel Then to jetstar service desk
2-3 staff seeing each passenger in turn
Waited 4 hours in line with no info offered until desk. No water/ food supplied, no check on infants/ elderly, no general broadcast made. At 2200 reached the desk and was Advised ft next day 0600, return at 0400. Given voucher to hotel. Misdirected to ' yellow bus'
Caught taxi own expense
$30 meal voucher: main meals $32- $50
Told to arrive airport 4 am. So 2.15am start.
Got there and flight already delayed.
Told this after 7 am.
Customs refused to allow duty free back through. Jetstar cs rep told me that all international travellers 'know this'
But at least half the passengers in same situation: nobody had advised us what we needed to do, the night before ( ie leave duty free with the shop, or secure in checked luggage).
Departure time drifted from 6 to 7 then 7.30 then 8 then 8.45
The excuse offered was that crew had been sent from melbourne and that their flight was delayed...
At 8. 50 am when additional info was demanded they said the next delay was because they had packed catering wrongly: domestic instead of international... As if we cared! We just want to go home- was this a silly lie ( to placate us) or just further stupidity? Couldnt say when we might actually leave...
Many, many disgruntled passengers, esp about the continued and repeated failure to update and advise...
The next unbelievable story- from the staff- is that they had sent our plane away to the gold coast and have brought it back now and unloaded those passengers and will load us at 10.
After 10 they told us they expected to load at 10.30. That came and went without comment. They told an enquirer that we would load at 1050. At 10.50 they told us they had borrowed plane stairs from air nz and would be loading soon.
A bus arrived to much excitement.
After another while they said they were waiting for paperwork to use the stair.
Time passed.
At 10.55 the bus drove away.
10.55 they announced that "they were making progress and we should now move to gate 3".
Nobody at gate 3.
After 30 minutes of nothing, we got an announcement to return to the previous boarding gate.
We passed a group from a melbourne flight which had been cancelled: like us the previous day, they were only told to go to a service desk.
To everyones amazement we subsequently boarded and took off at about 12.15 pm.
To add insult to injury once on board they offered us a complimentary non alcholic drink/ food item to the value of $4.
Begs the q: how can they have a license to run an airline, when management are either comedians, fools or liars?
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