This is the tale of how a bad airline can really f*ck up a good holiday.
This is the 100% true and factual recount of how it took us 8 hours to get from home to our destination, yet FIFTY FOUR AND A HALF HOURS to get home. All with two small children in tow.
We were travelling from rural New South Wales to have a holiday with relatives in northern Queensland. This meant a 3 hour drive to the airport, catching a flight from Newcastle to Cairns, then being picked up by our relatives and driven the rest of the way.
Getting There
We were booked with Jetstar (never again!) for both there and back and booked well in advance. Firstly we had booked a flight that left at noon, then only a week out they cancelled the flight and rebooked us on one over 3 hours later. A pain but we could handle it, it just meant missing out on part of our first day of holidays. We drove to the airport, leaving the requisite time to check in and reach our gate. When getting close to the airport I kept getting alerts on my phone about the Gate being changed, which happened about 3 times.
When we got into the terminal, we saw our flight had been delayed by a solid 90 minutes, which meant we had to entertain our kids in the terminal for an extra hour and a half. Funny how they never sent a phone alert about that. Because we ended up flying out 4 ½ hours later than we had booked for, it meant our relatives had to pick us up after dark and we totally missed out on our first day of holidays.
Getting Back
Jetstar guarantee’s on their website that all children will be seated with their parents/adult relatives. I checked our seats online the night before we were due to fly out and surprise surprise, they had sat our 9 year old son and 7 year old daughter in individual seats by themselves in different parts of the plane, well away both from each other and my wife and I. Two hours of trying to sort it out online resulted in a “get to the airport early and have the staff there sort it out” reply from Jetstar – thanks so much., how very efficient and customer friendly of you.
So we arrive at the airport a solid two hours before we would have had to be there otherwise, and spend a stupid amount of time with the staff until they can ensure our kids are sitting with us. We then have a LOT of time to kill at the terminal.
Half an hour before we were due to fly out, they announce that – once again – our flight has been delayed by 90 minutes! So now we have even more time to kill, and have two very understandably grumpy kids.
Finally, after being at the airport for about four hours, we board the plane and take off from Cairns to Newcastle. Getting to the end of the flight, and I mean right at the end -they had announced our descent 10 minutes previously and the seatbelt sign was on – the captain comes on:
“Please be aware that we have received a storm warning and all flights to Sydney and Newcastle are being diverted to Brisbane”
The groan in the plane was audible, and much muttering and bad language ensued from the passengers. We could SEE the airport from out of the window, there was nary a cloud in the sky! There might be a storm on the way but it certainly wasn’t there yet! We had been less than 3 minutes from landing!
So the plane turns around and we have another hour of flight to reach Brisbane.
We get off the plane. I’ve commented on how I’m more ‘Middle-aged Tired Trev’ than ‘Big Angry Trev’ these days, well, not by then. Anyone official not being immediately helpful was not abused, but certainly spoken to sharply in loud irritated tones. I didn’t go full Karen, but by Primus I wanted to.
My family finds some seats, and I get in the line for the desk that is arranging transport to hotels the airline has booked. I was in this line for ONE AND THREE-QUARTER HOURS! I have never been in a line that long in my life! By the time I reached the front I was ropeable! Thankfully my wife came up and did the talking to the girl behind the desk as I was standing back and audibly swearing. The girl told me not to abuse her to which I replied in an aggravated tone “I wasn’t swearing at you or about you or even looking at you so how about you just get on with it”. To be fair she was just doing her job, but she had a JetStar pin on her blazer which made her the enemy at this point. I did however stop swearing and just simmered in relative silence behind my wife.
A full hour after this they finally bus us to a hotel. We had left our resort at 7.30am, and it was now 8.30pm. 11 hours of travel and we hadn’t even managed to get out of the State! Our kids are tired and hungry, we are tired and hungry. My wife gets the kids in the shower and finds some children’s programming on the TV while I walk the streets of Brisbane trying to find a takeaway shop open.
By the time we went to bed we had eaten nothing but Airport Terminal food and some pizza slices and potato cakes for dinner. We get a message from the airport that our replacement flight will be leaving at 2PM TOMORROW AFTERNOON.
The next day they bus picks us at noon and thankfully this flight was only running 15 minutes late this time. However when we get back to Newcastle and collect our car, we find out that the road we would have used to go home is washed out from the overnight storm. So instead of a 3 hour drive home, we drive 4 ½ hours to my mothers-in-law’s in Bathrust. We reach there exhausted at about 9.30pm that night. We are now 38 hours into our trip home and yet still hours away from our house.
We wake up the next morning, repack the car and prepare to head off. Only one problem, one MAJOR problem. The Bathurst 1000, one of the biggest car races in the country, had been on over the weekend, and now they were finished every man and his dog was heading home, with most of them towing caravans. One of the bridges that served as an exit point to the town was underwater from the storm, so everyone is trying to get out of Bathurst using the same route. The whole town is gridlocked! We kept checking the traffic app every 15 minutes, but it is still noon by the time it lets up enough we can get in the car and start our final leg.
The drive from our mothers-in-law’s to our place takes maybe 20 minutes longer than usual as another bridge in our little home town is washed out from the storm two nights ago, so we had to take a detour to get to our farm. By the time we drive in the front gate we had been travelling for 54 ½ hours! We were exhausted and beaten and after unpacking the car collapsed as a family on our couch.
Since then we have vowed to never fly JetStar again unless absolutely necessary. We are realists, we realise that sometimes flight delays are inevitable and things happen out of the airlines control. But from some rudimentary online searching subsequent to this trip, I’ve found Jetstar is notorious for late flights, more so than most other airlines. On multiple websites they rate only a 1 Star average from thousands of customer reviews.
It was bad enough that we missed the first day of our holiday because they cancelled our booked flight, then delayed our rebooked flight by 90 minutes. But if they had just left when they were supposed to on the flight home, all our troubles could have been avoided. If they had even just landed when they were supposed to (I swear you could see the people on the ground we were so far into our final approach) instead of turning around despite the storm still not having arrived, all our troubles could have been avoided. But because they were running late, and because they couldn’t be bothered landing a plane which was moments from touchdown, by the time we reached our State the storms had actually arrived and washed out the highways we would normally take to our home.
As far as I’m concerned, Jetstar can fornicate themselves vigorously with a pointed stick. No wonder in 2017 an international survey ranked Jetstar as the worlds worst airline. In my opinion a truly inept company on every level. It would give me great joy to hear some irate baggage handler rammed some lost luggage up their CEO’s arse.
Have you had a bad experience with Jetstar? Pop it in the comments below!