Qantas executive: Airline “absolutely not” meeting customer expectations

A Qantas executive has admitted the airline is not meeting customer expectations, blaming economy-wide labour shortages and outbreaks of Covid and influenza for delays, cancellations and lost luggage.

Sydney airport on Sunday. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Flavio Brancaleone

A Qantas executive has admitted the airline is not meeting customer expectations, blaming economy-wide labour shortages and outbreaks of Covid and influenza for delays, cancellations and lost luggage.

Qantas Domestic and International chief executive Andrew David made the extraordinary admission following weeks of bad publicity in an opinion piece published by the airline on Sunday.

He denied poor traveller experience was due to the airline’s decision to outsource ground handling.

“Much has been said about Qantas in the last few months,” said Mr David. “Some of it’s fair, as we’re absolutely not delivering the service that our customers expect, but some of it fails to take into consideration what’s happening across the industry here and around the world.”

Qantas lost an appeal in the Federal Court in May, which had ruled the airline’s decision to outsource 2000 staff was illegal and also breached the Fair Work Act.

“Some have pointed to Qantas’ decision to outsource ground handling as a key reason the restart has been hard,” Mr David said. “This is not true. We had completed the ground handling changes before Easter 2021 when domestic travel was back to almost 100 per cent, and we didn’t have the issues we had at Easter this year.

“Others are using scaremongering tactics by making safety claims that are baseless and simply false. Every supplier we work with must adhere to our strict safety management system – a system that sees us consistently rated with the safest airlines in the world.

“Sadly, this is not the first time false claims have been made by a union to further an industrial agenda.”

Mr David pointed to the airline posting $6bn in losses and more than $24bn in lost revenue since the start of the pandemic, but noted they were able to “weather the storm” by making “very difficult decisions”.

“The truth is that the difficulties we are facing now are because of Covid and flu related sickness, as well as an extremely tight labour market,” he said.

Following months of complaints from travellers about call centre waiting times – some who say they were on hold for up to seven hours – Mr David said wait times were, on average, better than pre-Covid levels, after Qantas doubled the number of staff working in call centres.

He also said the airline had hired 1000 new staff, as well as rostering more staff on standby, consolidating flights onto bigger aircraft and adding more customer support staff at airports.

It comes as Qantas flew more than 350,000 passengers across Australia from Friday to Monday as the NSW, ACT and WA school holidays ended.

Virgin Australia flew about 100,000 passengers on Saturday and Sunday, with the airline recording an improvement of on-time performance despite some cancellations due to staff absenteeism. Some cancellations and delays were a result of absenteeism at air traffic control towers in Sydney and Darwin.