Should have flown Virgin Blue

My family were heading on a holiday to the Gold Coast- the first holiday we'd been able to save up for in over 2 years. When booking we checked Virgin and JetStar (Tiger didn't fly from Sydney at the time). The two holiday options were a Virgin Blue holiday flying out at 10 AM staying at a 4 star hotel for $1,780- wow, that's cheap we thought. Then we found a JetStar holiday flying out at 6AM staying at a 3 star hotel for $1,699. We took the JetStar deal because we thought the hotel's just somewhere to sleep and we don't mind getting up early. That was probably the biggest mistake we ever made. When we turned up at the airport at 4:50 AM we found that not a single check-in desk was open- hundreds of other passengers were all ready there and the number of people kept building until 5:15 AM when one of the check in desks opened. This remained the only check in desk to be open with passengers for about 6 flights trying to check in before 5:30, meanwhile there were about 8 Virgin check in desks open. By the time we got to the front of the queue it was 5:40 AM 10 mins after the check in closure- all because of JetStar opening only one check in desk. When we got to the desk the check in staff member told us we had missed our flight's closure time despite being at the airport 40 minutes prior to the check in closure. We were then informed that we would have to pay for other flights which would cost an additional $199 per person! We check with Virgin Blue who could get us a flight for $99 per person but not until 10:00 PM because all other flights were booked out. And Qantas (this was before they stopped flying to the Gold Coast)- had plenty of seats (not surprislingly) for $189 per preson but with $12 per person for terminal transfers. So we had no choice but pay an additional $199 per person for flights to the Gold Coast later on (good bye theme parks, outback spectacular and strabroke island tour). That flight was then delayed by 3 hours and when we finally arrived in the Gold Coast we found that our luggage had still been sent on the first flight to the Gold Coast and that Gold Coast air staff had been told that we hadn't shown for our flight and that it had been sent back to Sydney on another JetStar flight- they told us that our luggage would be delivered to our accomodation by midnight that night. However the luggage arrived 4 days later with a $48 baggage charge for the flights it has been sent on- we refused to pay this bill as it wasn't our fault that they sent our luggage on their aircraft to Sydney and back and especially the inconvience of wearing the same clothes for 4 days and a wrecked holiday because we had almost no money to spend (after having to pay an extra $199 p/p for additional flights, we had been resorted to buying McDonald's for all of our meals except breakfast)- when we were returning to Sydney we arrived at the airport 2 hours early and found that our flight had been cancelled by JetStar and that apparently they'd sent us an email to inform as 5 weeks ago with directions of how to change our flight, we showed the check in staff the email acount they said they had sent the email to and showed them their was no mail from JetStar the staff the accused us of deleting the e-mail and said we would have to pay for another flight- yet again! They asked us for $189 p/p- we refused to pay so much and ended up returning with Virgin Blue for $100 p/p. Then after this holiday from hell we returned home to find JetStar had charged the $48 luggage bill we refused to pay from our debit card!
JetStar is an airline which I'll never be travelling with again- or Qantas for that matter seing that they own JetStar.