Hell hath no fury like a delayed economist. With a white paper process in the wings examining Australia’s world-lagging passenger rights regime, the last thing Qantas needed was to annoy one of the nation’s best policy brains.
Yet that’s clearly what happened over the weekend, prompting Saul Eslake take to LinkedIN and unleash one of the better sprays by an aggrieved customer that CBD can recall.
Saul Eslake addressing the National Press Club in May.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
“I am so sick of being stuffed around by airlines!” Eslake began, before detailing a how his troubles began with a Cathay Pacific flight from Hong Kong to Sydney that was more than two hours late departing.
That left Eslake unsuccessfully racing the clock in Sydney to catch his plane to Hobart, which he missed by about 15 minutes. And he was far from impressed at the airlines’ efforts to help him
Cathay wouldn’t contact Qantas to alert them to his plight nor do anything to “expedite” his “deplaning”, he said. Nor did Qantas hold on for a “connecting” passenger which he said had been known to happen.
This left Saul “twiddling my thumbs” in Sydney’s Qantas Lounge for the best part of six hours - a move Qantas may regret given his deployment of said thumbs to social media.
The tipping point appears to have been when Qantas delayed his flight home to Tasmania.
“Airlines repeatedly fail to deliver what customers like me pay them to deliver, offer BS excuses (if they give any reason at all) for failing to deliver, and expect us to be mollified by repeated expressions of “thanks for our patience” as if that were in inexhaustible supply. I am just so sick of it!,” Eslake posted.
Fair to say he wasn’t happy when a half hour delay was attributed to a late arriving crew, on a Qantas flight.
“So yet more thumb-twiddling and patience-showing. Great work, Qantas!,” he said, before posting a text from the airline that many passengers would recognise, along with his own caption reading: “No Qantas I don’t think you’re ‘sorry’ at all”.
After another text, Eslake’s exasperation was heading sky high: “Oh Qantas are ‘sorry’ again - BS, BS, BS!!!”
Eslake told his followers that this flight was going to be leaving Sydney 15 minutes after its original scheduled arrival time in Hobart.
“It just staggers me how they all expect you to just “suck it up”. And if you try to take it up with their “customer relations” teams, you get the sort of formulaic BS responses (“we sincerely regret ... “, “we understand” - but we’re not going to do anything) that I used to have to write as a very junior Treasury officer in the late 1970s to people who were naive enough to think that when they wrote to the Treasurer he gave their correspondence his personal attention.”
When CBD caught up with a still-cranky Eslake on Monday, he had more to say about his woes, detailing traipsing miles through Hong Kong airport thanks to multiple gate changes, a Cathay-rejected request for a helping hand off the plane from his row 50 seat and a fruitless plea for understanding from Qantas at the Sydney transfer desk 20 minutes before his Hobart plane left.
A Qantas spokesperson said Eslake’s booking was made with Cathay Pacific which rebooked his connecting flight to Hobart “due to their delayed arrival into Sydney”.
Eslake’s next flight, to Hobart, was one of many disrupted due to the “extreme winds” at Sydney Airport that saw planes grounded and services reduced.
“As frustrating as this may have been, Mr Eslake’s Qantas flight between Sydney and Hobart was delayed due to safety measures in response to the weather conditions,” they said.
We dropped a line to Cathay too . We will let you know when we hear back. We’re almost certain they “sincerely regret” the delay.