Fuming woman says Qantas kept her on hold for eight and a half hours

Aussie radio show gets multiple callers saying airline has kept them on the phone for hours

A Qantas Airbus A380 (Getty Images)

An irate Qantas customer has claimed that the airline kept her on hold for more than eight and a half hours.

Katrina showed presenters of Sydney’s Radio2GB her call log, featuring a call of eight hours and 39 minutes.

“I took the call to a meeting, I took the call to an eatery,” she told them.

Her colleagues were equally astonished by the amount of time spent on hold, she says.

“It was a two-hour meeting and we had the music playing in the background the whole time.”

Several customers called into presenter Ben Fordham’s show on Tuesday after a listener named Todd complained that he’d been kept on the phone for six hours and 31 minutes by the Australian flag carrier.

Another caller claimed that, after several hours on hold, they were put through to a South African call centre.

Meanwhile, Twitter user Huso Medanovic posted a screenshot of a call, allegedly to Qantas, which showed he’d been on the line for five hours and eight minutes.

“Qantas as usual bringing out their best customer service delivery (NOT). Flex Business class ticket purchased, asked for amendment or refund and nobody had an idea what’s happened with the cancellation. Almost five hours on the phone with service team,” he wrote.

Last week Qantas attracted some lively debate about its customer service after launching a nostalgic new advert, featuring Kylie Minogue and Hugh Jackman among other Australian celebrities.

Echoing the lyrics of the ‘Qantas anthem’ - Peter Allen’s I Still Call Australia Home - follower Traff Judd wrote: “But no matter how far or how wide I roam, Qantas still doesn’t answer their phone”.

Catherine Rae told Daily Mail Australia that she’d spent three hours on hold trying to change a booking for her parents after their flight was rescheduled.

“I wonder how many other people are frustrated by the terrible communication and customer service from Qantas.

“You would think with them spending all this money on adverts and having two years of grounded flights they’d want to get their service right and retain customers where they can.”

A Qantas spokesperson said: “These wait times are not acceptable, and we apologise to customers who have waited so long to get through to us. Our customers have been very understanding and we appreciate everyone’s patience.

“No airline’s contact centres were designed to be able to manage the record number of calls and complexity of Covid-related queries, which continue to impact customer wait times as people re-book travel that’s been delayed for the past two years. We’re also seeing a fresh wave of calls with every change to a border somewhere in the world, as Covid restrictions are wound back, which often occur at no notice.

“Because Covid has significantly changed our network and that of our partner airlines, many customer queries are far more complex than they were pre-pandemic and are on average taking 50 per cent longer to resolve when chatting to one of our agents.

“We’ve already added hundreds of staff to our call centres, and each month we are recruiting and training more people.”