Australia’s flag carrier, Qantas, is facing severe criticism by its passengers for repeated delays and cancellations.
One Australian FIFO worker, who wanted to remain anonymous, expressed her frustration with the continuous delays of her Qantas flights. After facing yet another cancellation on July 25, the woman decided to count all her previous Qantas flights that were rescheduled for one reason or another.
After checking the records, she came to know that she had been on the receiving end of delayed or canceled flights at least 25 times in the last ten months.
Due to her FIFO job nature, she has to travel frequently between Sydney, Perth, and the northern areas of Western Australia. Her company only uses Qantas, which essentially means that the woman is forced to travel with them and suffer from continuous delays and cancellations at the eleventh hour.
She also claimed that she had faced three flight delays in the last three weeks due to “fault” in the planes, adding that she is often stuck at her remote workplace during her holidays due to persistent flight issues.
According to the Bureau of Infrastructure and Transport Research Economics (BITRE), Qantas canceled at least 640 flights in June this year, impacting the travel plans of thousands of passengers.
This comes at a time when Qantas was already suffering from a reputation crisis for selling tickets for ghost flights that they had already planned to cancel.
An Australian Federal Court imposed a penalty of $100 million on the aviation giant while also ordering them to pay $20 million in damage to impacted customers.
The airliner admitted to selling tickets to “phantom flights” that were never supposed to fly in the first place and ended up troubling more than 86,000 passengers from May 2021 to August 2023.
Reportedly, the company also failed to notify thousands of customers about flight cancellations, which further increased passengers’ inconvenience.
After admitting guilt, the company’s CEO, Ms Hudson, stated that they are taking an important step to rebuild customers’ trust in their brand. Hudson apologized to the customers and pledged to bring in new technology to avoid such situations in the future, but the crisis remains unresolved with no solution in sight.