According to the Sydney Morning Herald QANTAS, in what many will see as heralding an ongoing and significant decline in service in general across airlines in Australia, wants its passengers to fend for themselves even more.
Why?
Because it is intending to permanently close its staffed service and sales desks across all Australian airports and lounges, presumably the customer service desks, which for me and I know others, have been a saviour when things go wrong!
Interestingly the move comes not long after Virgin Australia’s new owners Bain Capital announced that Virgin Australia, now run by Jayne Hrdlicka, former CEO of Jetstar and recognised as the Australia “queen” of low cost, low service airlines, will be a “hybrid” airline sitting between the full-service and low-cost models.
Bain Capital claimed Virgin Australia was staking out the middle of the market, rather than directly taking on Qantas or Jetstar.
Subsequently it has also become very obvious that Virgin Australia will very like not even by a hybrid airline, but will be a low cost carrier competing with Jetstar and not QANTAS allowing Virgin Australia’s market position resulting in a reduction of premium services by Virgin Australia, allowing QANATS to do likewise.
QANTAS though says the reduction in services is as result of both the impact of Covid-19 and cost-savings across the business and a result of a shift by passengers towards the use of apps, self-service kiosks and bag drop facilities, but the challenges will be when customer service desks really come into their own, such as issues related to flight disruptions, cancellations, last-minute changes and for less tech-savvy passengers when face to face is really required.
The report in the Sydney Morning says QANTAS will retain its staffed check-in desks, so one tiny sliver of good news, but amazingly lost-baggage counter hours will be gone and all other services will be self-managed.
QANTAS though says that they are introducing enhancements to the QANTAS app, which will make it easier for travellers to perform tasks often previously undertaken at a customer service desk for example, seat changes or excess or oversize baggage payments and other services. Yeah right!!
In addition, amazingly and bearing in mind what I said about Virgin Australia, QANTAS has announced that staffed service desks in the QANTAS Club and Business Lounges are also going. A very interesting move when quality services for business travellers provide an important competitive, but of course, there will be no premium competition as Virgin Australia will be a low cost, low service carrier!
The report does say though that QANTAS will have a team available at the airport to support time sensitive flight management and exceptions, which as we all know tend to happen at very short or with no notice, so that should be interesting.
So, there we go another downhill move to lower service by QANTAS, rather than enhancing service to attract and retain customers, a very interesting approach to business, but, oh, sorry I forget, it appears QANTAS for some time has very sadly no longer been not about quality service for customers at all, but return on shareholder investment and big salaries and bonuses!
A report by John Alwyn-Jones
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