The other week I headed up to Sydney, taking the train up on way, and a Qantas flight home. Unlike other airlines in Australia, Qantas still offers a full meal service on many of their domestic flights.
The meal service caught me out last time I flew with Qantas – I forgot to specify a vegetarian meal for my girlfriend, leaving her to chow down on bread rolls and chocolate bars!
This time she made sure that I made a special request, so I headed over to the Qantas website to add it against our booking. I entered her selection, and clicked save, only for this error page to appear:
It read:
Your reservation is confirmed, but your special request could not be processed for these flights. Please contact us for further information. (4609 – 0)
A very useless error message, made all the more useless because they don’t actually tell you how to contact them!
After finding the Qantas call centre phone number on their website, and waiting on hold for 15 minutes – I finally got an answer:
You can’t make a meal request for a flight that doesn’t offer a meal service
It least this time forgetting to specify a vegetarian meal wouldn’t have affected my other half, but it would have been nice if the website had have told me the issue upfront, instead of wasting time on the phone!
Footnote
On the day of the flight I got a call from Qantas – “we have a planeload of international passengers who are going to miss their connection – are you able to move to the 8pm flight?” I said yes, and when we boarded said flight we discovered that they *was* a hot dinner on offer.
Turns out Qantas flights departing between 6pm and 8pm offer a ‘dinner’ service, with refreshments at other times.
Fifteen plus minutes out of your life that won’t get back.
Thanks for making the trip up!!!
Was waiting to see if it would turn into a blog post of some kind 😛
My lead time between drafting blog posts and publishing them is quite long!