Summary

Jetstar's decision to change our flight times, has cost us over 20% of the cricket match we paid to see and 8 hours of our weekend holiday we took to Adelaide. Their customer relations policy is utterly inflexible about the flight changes, offering only flights on a following day or a refund which will take 5 weeks to process as alternatives.

They try to justify these changes because neither of the individual flight changes were more than 6 hours. Their call center tries to make moving a call up to a supervisor as difficult as possible. When we finally got to speak to a supervisor, they would only give us their first name.

We discovered a wealth of other complaints on the net and thought we should use this opportunity to publicise the unfairness being perpetrated on the unwitting public. Caleb wrote a letter into the Herald Sun, which appeared in the Nov 30th edition, describing our plight.

We managed to arrive with 10 mins to spare before their 30 minute checkin cutoff when we left Avalon and on the way home, so we managed to avoid their ruling that anyone past 30 mins before the flight will have to pay for their ticket again, in order to be allowed onto the plane. They notify you of this rule by email several days before the flight. This notice contains a bunch of other information that someone might skip through. If we had known that our flights could be moved to upto 6 hours, I would not have booked with Jetstar.

If you have any tales of woe from your dealings with Jetstar, please add a comment to this post.