QANTAS Airways has hit consumer advocacy organisation CHOICE with their own staff, labelling the data used in their Shonky Awards “a bit shonky” itself.
This year’s iteration of CHOICE’s long-running Awards today claimed Qantas “continues to disappoint”, with the organisation’s Chief Executive Officer Alan Kirkland suggesting the airline went out of its way to win a Shonky in 2022.
“Qantas customers have had to deal with unfair and unworkable flight credits, lost baggage, excessive call wait times, and delayed flights,” he indicated, adding, “Qantas charges travellers premium prices, but they are not providing anything close to a premium service”.
CHOICE punctuated its assessment with a reworking of Qantas’ famous sobriquet “the Spirit of Australia” to “the Spirit of Disappointment”; however, the organisation’s assessment of QF’s performance did not go unnoticed by the airline.
“These awards are clearly out of date,” Qantas insisted in a statement, adding “we’ve been very transparent with our performance figures, both good and bad, but CHOICE is using figures that are just wrong.
“We had several months of poor performance earlier in the year, but it’s improved significantly since August and we’re back to our pre-COVID level of service.
“We’ve beaten Virgin for on-time flights eight out of the past 12 months, and in some months, that’s been by a significant margin.”
Qantas listed a number of claims from CHOICE which the airline described as “not correct” or “misleading”, such as those regarding its call wait times, flight credit redemption, and on-time performance.
“Our call wait times are less than half what CHOICE is claiming,” Qantas said.
“Our customers have redeemed more than $1 billion in COVID-related flight credits…the conditions for these are the same or better than they were pre-COVID and we’re actively encouraging our customers to use them.”
