I've flown Jetstar regularly since they arrived in NZ, with almost no issues until late last year. Sure, their booking website was a bit buggy at times, but manageable. And apart from occasional delays of up to an hour (mostly less, or none at all), I've had no issues with their actual flights or in-person service staff.
However, persistent website bugs early this year followed by huge delays and hassles getting a refund they owed me, followed by even larger problems with their voucher system (they'd sent me one as an apology for the refund issue) has completely turned me off the airline.
To save $50 now and again is nice. But I've found this year that, if any little thing goes wrong with their systems, it costs me hours and hours on the phone, website - even mailing a letter of complaint in - all to no avail. Their customer service, while generally friendly if you keep an even tone yourself, is utterly opaque, appallingly disjointed and stunningly unresponsive.
This year, their call centre has become noticeably weaker and less able to resolve issues than it was previously. Their "supervisors" there are similarly impaired in their ability to act (one even hung up on me after I insisted they must have SOME mechanism for verifiably resolving a problem that they acknowledged was theirs).
Their staff are also very inclined to repeatedly make promises ("it will be within 5 working days") and commitments ("yes, I will personally check this tomorrow to make sure it happened") which are not honoured, again and again. And finally, their other departments (Finance, Customer Relations) are unresponsive, and do not back their frontline staff up with timely action.
This is a recipe for creating major customer dissatisfaction and, in my case, it has succeeded. The most recent episode took four weeks to resolve - calling, website form submissions, snailmailing (and even trying to contact them via Qantas). A few days after it was finally sorted, I got a call from one of their customer relations people trying to make good, and as a result I have ended up with yet more vouchers, totalling a decent sum of money.
But he knew and I know that it was far too late - the repeated failures to solve a simple problem were adding layers of unwelcome stress, wasted time and international mobile costs to a much-needed holiday from the quake zone.
The "resolution", personally, is vouchers I may never have the confidence to use. The resolution for the organisation as a whole needs to be to employ someone who understands how important customer service and confidence is to a brand - especially an airline - and who is given the power to do something about it.
Based on this year's run of customer service disasters, I'm not holding my breath.