Passenger lifts lid on disastrous Jetstar flight from Vietnam to Melbourne

A Jetstar passenger has lifted the lid on a cancelled flight from Vietnam, where strangers were booked to share hotel rooms.

It’s 6am. I’ve phoned home to explain I won’t be back today as planned because I’ve just spent 11 punishing hours at Ho Chi Minh City airport waiting for a flight that never took off, when there’s a knock on my hotel door.

I open it to find a strange man looking as tired and beaten as I feel.

“I’m sharing a room with you,” he says.

I stare at him in shock. “Um, no you’re not.”

“Please! Wait!” he pleads as I shut the door, feeling guilty but also furious at Jetstar for putting us both in this situation.

You’ve probably heard about JQ64, the latest debacle from the Australian carrier in which 300-plus passengers were stranded in Vietnam’s largest city late last month.

Unfortunately I was one of them.

JQ64 is just the latest debacle from Jetstar. Picture: Nicholas Eagar/NCA NewsWire

I still can’t believe what happened. The airline’s disgraceful attempt to make strangers share hotel rooms – including at least two reported instances of single women being asked to bunk in with men – grabbed the headlines, but it was a fiasco from the get-go.

Here’s the quick version of what went down.

For starters, flyers were confused about what time they were actually departing given Jetstar messaged us a fortnight before to say the scheduled 10.30pm departure was delayed to 12.30am, but its website still insisted we’d leave at 10.30pm.

By 6.30pm hopeful passengers were already queuing at check-in counter L, which didn’t open until 9.30pm.

Still, at least there was entertainment – in the form of a young Vietnamese kid zipping between our legs and luggage on a motorised suitcase that played Old MacDonald Had a Farm and the ABC Song. Ad nauseam.

Hours later we’re corralled at departure gate 17 when, finally, boarding commenced around 12.30am. At 12.45am, boarding stopped and “deboarding” began.

There was no public announcement explaining why. When I questioned one of the gate staff she said, “engineering problem” – that mother-of-all-airline-excuses.

Passengers were completely left in the dark about what was going on. Picture: Luis Enrique Ascui/NCA NewsWire

We hung about in limbo till 2am, when there was movement at the gate again. We’ve started boarding! At 2.08, boarding stopped.

A gate attendant told those within earshot we are deboarding, again. But the few passengers who made it onto the plane did not re-emerge. Not immediately, anyway.

It was another two hours before they filed off the aircraft and gathered behind the glass of the secure airbridge. It seemed obvious our flight was doomed but gate staff said nothing.

In all that time there was not a single public announcement explaining what the hell was going on.

Then, at 4.59am, our phones started pinging. “Your flight JQ64 … has been cancelled,” read the message from Jetstar. “You have been rebooked on JQ64 departing at 10.35pm.”

Confusion reigned as we shuffled off to immigration to have visas reissued then to the arrivals hall to retrieve luggage from a mountain of bags dumped on the floor.

I felt for the elderly, and the parents of young children, having to navigate this hellscape after a sleepless night. With scant direction from ground staff, it was left to us to look after each other.

Passengers were sent back out into Ho Chi Minh City to find a hotel. Picture: iStock

We’d established from airport staff that we’d be accommodated in a hotel but no-one told us which one(s). I asked around and a fellow traveller shared a screenshot he took after quizzing gate attendants. It said Tan Son Nhat Hotel.

We emerged into the Saigon night to find one harried man with a clipboard trying to deal with hundreds of us. No transport had been arranged. At that pre-dawn hour, there were precisely two cabs at the rank. Hunger Games ensued.

Eventually I nabbed a taxi and grabbed three other passengers to ride with me to the hotel.

As I write this it’s been two weeks since the ordeal and I still have no straight answers from Jetstar.

They can’t say why there were no announcements keeping us informed. Or when precisely they knew the plane was not fit to fly (presumably it was at 2.08am). And they continue to deny responsibility for passengers being asked to share rooms.

“This is strictly against our policy,” Jetstar’s ‘head of customer’ James Madden emailed me. Yet when I interviewed the hotel’s front office manager Quynh Lan on video, she said Jetstar initially only booked 50 rooms.

“Jetstar said that if the guests don’t like to share the room, maybe put them in individual rooms,” she confirmed, adding that the airline increased its booking to 80 rooms after passengers revolted.

Jetstar refused to address my specific questions, merely repeating there was “an issue with an aircraft door” and apologising for the “disappointment”.

No-one questions airlines making such decisions based on safety.

But carriers have a duty of care to communicate what’s going on to customers, and then to take care of them. Jetstar went AWOL.

Jetstar also left passengers trapped on a plane at Alice Springs airport for seven hours. Picture: Nine News

So far I’ve spoken to Felipe Castillo Montt, their corporate communications manager, Mr Madden, and Kerryn Jones from Jetstar’s customer advocacy team. She at least conceded there’d been “a massive breakdown in communication” between the airline and its customers. “It’s definitely not our proudest moment, that’s for sure,” she said.

No. Nor was that time just days earlier when Jetstar left passengers trapped on a plane at Alice Springs airport for seven hours. Or those times last year when they abruptly cancelled flights leaving thousands stranded in Bali and Thailand.

They just don’t care anymore.

What happened next?

After the PR disaster of JQ64, Jetstar emailed affected passengers on March 9 offering them a $200 voucher “as a gesture of goodwill”. Yeah, nah. In future if I want cheap flights to Vietnam I’ll try Vietjet.

Its new direct services to HCMC, launching from Melbourne and Sydney next month and Brisbane in June, have fares starting from $200 (taxes and fees extra, until October 25) plus free domestic flights within Vietnam.

This article originally appeared on Escape and was reproduced with permission