Qantas has announced a deal with “Boy from Oz” Hugh Jackman in an effort to promote Qantas on the global stage, however this was of little help to Australian attendees to IFA in Berlin who found on their arrival that their bags were missing and the onboard entertainment system stuffed.
Executives from Samsung and Harvey Norman were among those who had to buy clothes in Berlin, so that they could attend events at the IFA International trade show, in some cases the baggage arrived 3 days late.
In Berlin Qantas Business Class flyers who are also Platinum Frequent Flyer Members were forced to wait nearly two hours to report the loss of their luggage. Calls to Qantas in Australia were transferred to London where staff said they “had no knowledge” of the missing bags.
On top of that the Qantas app which the airline loves to brag about as being “customer friendly” has no way of reporting lost baggage, but it does have buttons to sell you a car rental or hotel bookings.
On top of that several people flying to IFA on QF 1 to London found that they could not watch movies, even Hugh Jackman Movies due to a failure of the Qantas entertainment system, on the airlines A380 aircraft.
Investigations by SmartHouse found that the problem was not the Panasonic on board entertainment system but the headphone connector that connects into the seat.
Qantas on board staff said that the problem was quite common.
SmartHouse witnessed at least four seats having to be reset, we also noticed problems with the pop up touch screens with users of the entertainment system having to tap away from buttons because the touch sensitivity of the screens were out of alignment.
Earlier this year Qantas were forced to resort back to using aircraft with the old Rockwell entertainment system, these systems which constantly failed were unable to deliver the same level of entertainment as the Panasonic entertainment system.
Qantas PR staff in Sydney fobbed off SmartHouse when we raised concerns about the missing luggage and the constant failure of the Qantas on-board entertainment system.
Customers who had paid $7,995 for a trip to Berlin and back were only offered 10,000 frequent flyer points as compensation.
This is the third time this year that I personally have boarded a Qantas International flight only to find that the entertainment system was not working.
In today’s announcement Qantas said that the award-winning actor has signed on to become an official global ambassador for the airline and will also work with Qantas on community projects in Australia.
The international superstar is one of Australia’s most successful and highly regarded performers with a career spanning 30 years from his early days in “Correlli” right after his graduation from Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, to his recent stage and screen successes including the X-Men films, The Boy from Oz stage show, the film version of Les Mis?rables and the soon to be released fantasy film Pan.
Jackman said he was proud to become a Qantas Ambassador and was looking forward to teaming up with Qantas to highlight the best of Australia.
Qantas CEO Alan Joyce said the airline was thrilled to welcome Hugh Jackman in to the Qantas family as an ambassador he made no reference to missing baggage or the constant failure of the Qantas entertainment system.
ChannelNews is waiting on a response from the Australian Competition + Consumer Commission in relation to Qantas constantly selling services that fail to deliver.
The airline has also failed to deliver any reports on how many times their entertainment system fails on flights or how many customers they have been forced to compensate because of their failure to deliver an entertainment system service.
