‘Embarrassing’: Ben Fordham lashes out at Qantas over ‘appalling’ customer service

A popular Sydney radio host has savaged Qantas, saying you can fly from Sydney to Perth faster than you can get customer service to pick up the phone.

Ben Fordham has called Qantas’ customer service “embarrassing”, with some people waiting close to seven hours to have their calls answered.

Qantas’ wait times at 4am on Wednesday were two hours, with Fordham saying the situation is “appalling”.

“That’s not customer service, that’s gaslighting,” Fordham said on 2GB on Thursday morning.

“You can actually fly to Sydney from Perth faster than you get someone to pick up the phone at Qantas.”

2GB radio host Ben Fordham has not held back on Qantas’ customer service. Picture: John Feder / The Australian

Qantas chief customer officer Stephanie Tully appeared on the show and said the problem would be fixed.

“I want to sincerely apologise to our customers, the wait times are not acceptable at all and it is our top priority to fix this,” Ms Tully said.

But she revealed that despite these delays, Qantas had more customer service staff than ever.

“We’ve actually got more people working in our contact centres than we did pre-Covid. It’s one of the areas of the business where there wasn’t redundancies or stand downs, we’ve actually been growing,” Ms Tully said.

Qantas chief customer officer Stephanie Tully (middle) said the problem would be fixed. Picture: Andrew Henshaw

She said Covid was still impacting the logistics of travelling, with one customer having to make 11 changes to their flight on Wednesday.

“There’s a record-high amount of calls and the calls are taking longer for a variety of reasons,” she said.

“We also need to understand that Covid has hit us hard. A lot of the customers calling, they’ve had changes due to borders starting and opening, they’ve got cancellations, things are changing quickly.”

Fordham retorted that after Qantas received around $2bn of taxpayer support during Covid “one would think that you’d be well placed to have staff ready to answer the calls”.

He also told Ms Tully that Qantas “have to be careful” because customers were leaving, with listeners texting in to say they were now flying with other airlines.

Covid is impacting on the quality of Qantas’ customer service, as travellers try to adjust to the different border rules and Covid regulations. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Jono Searle

On when customers can expect to see improvements, Ms Tully said the airline’s customer service was constantly getting better.

“It will get better every week for our customers as we hire more and more people into our centres,” she said.

She also encouraged customers to use Qantas’ website to find the answers to their queries.