Tag: qantas

Travel review – Qantas Business Class Sydney to Los Angeles

Qantas transpacific business class is good way to travel on a long flight if you have the budget

My heart sank on checking in for my United Airlines flight to Los Angeles at Sydney Airport. “Sorry sir, there’s a problem with the flight,” said the impeccably polite United Airlines check in clerk.

His next comment made my day. “We’ll be transferring you to the Qantas flight,” and so a few minutes later I had a Qantas boarding pass for QF11 for the 14 hour flight to Los Angeles and access to their Business Class lounge at Sydney International.

Qantas-business-class-sydney-lounge

Time only permitted a short visit to the Business class lounge which is spacious with a generous range of self service drinks but a somewhat limited range of food. What is available is pleasant and adequate and the lounge is a good place to get some last minute work done or relax with the interesting view of the airport.

Aboard the plane

On the plane there’s a big difference between the two airlines’ business classes; Qantas Flight QF11 between Sydney and Los Angeles is an Airbus A380 with six abreast seats in business class while United’s equivalent is a Boeing 777 with eight cramped seats.

Qantas-business-class-seatskybed ready for take off

Reflecting this, Qantas’ Business Class lie flat Skybeds are generously wide with a personal lights, privacy screens and personal video. International power sockets are easily accessible at the front of the arm rests.

The plane is a touch grubby and worn which is surprising for such a modern plane. The service itself is very friendly and polite with Business Class passengers welcomed with a choice of soft drinks or sparkling wine.

Flight amenities include a set of simple cotton pyjamas along with blankets and a basic kit that includes toothpaste, eye shades and travel socks.

Shortly after take off, the cabin crew offer to put a thin mattress on the seats to make them more padded and comfortable, particularly for sleeping.

Qantas-business-class-skybed-lumbar-supportseat controls including the massage functions

The lie flat beds are reasonably comfortable with various lumbar options and a fairly weird massage function that doesn’t seem to do a great deal.

Overall the Qantas Sky Beds allow a good night’s sleep which is the main point of paying for business on a long haul flight.

Inflight service

Cabin service is polite and efficient although the cabin crew have a habit of vanishing. One of the downsides of the vanishing crew is it’s easy to end up dehydrated over the 14 hour journey despite their prompt response to the cabin call button.

Qantas-business-class-late-night-snackearly morning coffee and crackers

When called there were plenty of food and drink options although snacks surprising ran out later in the flight leaving only the option of cheese and biscuits with an early morning coffee.

Qantas-business-class-dinnerdinner service

Dinner was served two hours into the flight and the minced chicken on noodles was a reasonable meal although a touch bland, the cheese tray suffered the perennial airline problem of being stingy with the biscuits.

Qantas-business-class-breakfastBreakfast bruschetta

Breakfast ninety minutes out from Los Angeles had a fairly standard range of airline breakfasts – the mushroom bruschetta was a pleasant, light and tasty option.

Surfing the options

The inflight entertainment system is a fairly standard offering with a good range of current and older movies and TV series. The personalised playlist being a bit of a disappointment given it doesn’t automatically move on at the end of each song while the news and current affairs programs are somewhat parochial although that’s forgiven on the Australian flag carrier.

Arrival in Los Angeles was on time with the only draw back being that Qantas couldn’t check bags through to JFK which required collected bags at Tom Bradley, dragging them across to United’s Terminal Seven and re-checking the bags. For connecting flights this is a bit of a hassle although its made easier when you’ve arrived relaxed and refreshed after a good night’s sleep.

Overall, the Qantas A380 Business Class is comfortable product that meets the needs of a business traveller who needs to work or sleep on a flight. If your budget — or that of your employer — can cover the cost then its a choice worth making.

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You can’t cost cut your way to growth

Cosy management leaves a business exposed to disruption as Australia’s Qantas Airlines has discovered.

Yesterday I interviewed Alex Bard, Senior Vice President for Service Cloud at Salesforce for the Decoding The New Economy YouTube channel.

Alex’s interview will be up tomorrow, but during the conversation afterwards he made a comment about modern management saying, “you can’t cost cut your way to growth.”

This is at odds with 1980s management theory where CEOs like Jack Welsh at GE and Al ‘Chainsaw’ Dunlap at Scott Paper slashed costs to bring listless businesses back into profit.

During that period, many businesses were overstaffed and poorly managed so leaders like Welsh and Dunlap were the right men for their time.

To a generation of bean counting executives, Dunlap and Welsh proved that any business problem could be fixed by cutting costs. They were truly men of their times.

Which brings us to Australia’s Qantas Airlines who, at the time Alex Bard and I were having coffee, announced 5,000 job cuts; close to 25% of the company’s workforce.

Qantas certainly does have problems as shown in its $252 million loss and some of them, as with all legacy national carriers, lie with long outdated labour arrangements.

However the airline’s problems are much deeper than a featherbedded workforce and most of the blame for Qantas’ dilemma lies with the company’s management.

Management mistakes have included maintaining an old fleet of Boeing 767s and 747s while pouring investment into their discount subsidiary, disastrous international alliances in Asia that have seen them kicked out of Vietnam and planes for their Japanese venture grounded in Europe.

Probably the biggest mistake though for Qantas though was management’s assumption it had a cosy position in its domestic market.

Like most Australian industries, the nation’s aviation sector is a duopoly dominated by Qantas, a result of the 1980s theory that the country could sustain global champions subsidised by hapless domestic consumers.

This theory has proved disastrously wrong for Australian consumers with the duopolies becoming very good at exploiting their domestic market power after deciding it was simply to hard to compete outside the home country.

For Australia, the consequence of this strategic mistake by the country’s business and political leaders has been to make domestic industries hopelessly uncompetitive as local managers are largely isolated from genuine competitive pressures.

Qantas is the classic case study of Australia’s insular corporate mentality as the airline steadily abandoned its international routes and focused on maximising profits on its domestic operations, particularly those unfortunate rural routes where the Flying Kangaroo has no competition.

Unfortunately for Qantas’ shareholders; Virgin Australia, the other duopoly player in the Australian airline industry, wasn’t going to play by the rules that keeps the rest of the country’s complacent corporate sector relaxed and comfortable.

As a consequence, Qantas found itself in a damaging price war as it sought to protect its 65% domestic market share. Worse still for the airline, its competitor started offering Business Class services and competitive lounge facilities that started to erode its most lucrative fares.

For Qantas, the sensible option is to focus on its strengths and build in its most profitable areas but instead the airline’s CEO, Alan Joyce, chooses to fight for the airline’s precious two third market share while slashing staff numbers.

Alan’s response is classic ‘cutting for growth’ and it won’t work – the airline desperately needs investment and visionary management, both of which it won’t get.

Cosy management can prosper in a cosy market, but it leaves those companies exposed to disruption from keener competitors and that’s what Qantas is learning.

Sadly for Qantas’ management, they aren’t in the 1980s and Joyce is no Jack Welsh. Today, as Alex Bard points out, the game is customer service and slashing your workforce is the wrong starting point.

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Trolls never sleep – Social media and the twenty four hour business

Qantas Airlines learns the hard way that social media doesn’t sleep, unlike its marketing department.

One of the truths of social media is it gives idiots an opportunity to expose themselves for what they are.

For businesses using social media idiots posting stupid or offensive content on the company’s site or Facebook page can do a lot of damage to their brand and reputation.

This is the problem Australian airline Qantas faced last week when some fool posted a pornographic image to one of the company’s promotions pages.

As the Sydney Morning Herald reports, the father of an eight year old reported an inappropriate post to the airline after his son found the image while visiting the Qantas Wallabies page. He was allegedly told by the company’s social media staff “there was nothing we can do about it.”

The father points out correctly that both the airline and Facebook are 24 hour operations so claiming a post that is put up at midnight – one assumes Eastern Australian time – is out of hours seems to be disingenuous.

Until recently, businesses had given social media responsibilities over to the intern or the youngest person in the office. While organisations like Qantas have moved on from that, they largely leave these tasks with the marketing department.

While marketing is a valid place for social media responsibility – it’s probably the most obvious area to establish a return on the functions – it leaves organisations vulnerable to out of hours customer service and public relations problems.

Social media doesn’t knock off at 5pm and spend the evening a bar like the marketing department, it’s on all the time and customers are using it to complain about problems while twits and trolls are gleefully posting things to embarrass businesses.

For those businesses who do operate on a 24 hour basis, and probably all big corporations, it’s no longer good enough for the social media team to just operate during office hours.

Smaller businesses have a different problem – most don’t have the resources to keep a 24 hour watch on their Facebook page but the effects of a social media disaster could be proportionally far greater – so they shouldn’t be overlooking regular checks on what people have posted to their business sites.

What’s happening in social media is part of a broader trend in the global economy that’s been going on for thirty years as the pace of business has accelerated. It’s something that all managers, entrepreneurs and company owners need to understand.

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Travel review – Melbourne to Sydney QF490

An easy flight from Melbourne to Sydney with the added bonus of queuing at both ends.

Returning from Xero’s Australian Partners’ Conference in Melbourne was again on Qantas, an evening flight rounded off a busy couple of days. Alas the free drinks on evening flights are no more for economy passengers.

Check in

Once again Qantas’ byzantine seat allocation only made aisle seats towards the back of the plane available.

This is an irritation if you aren’t a frequent Qantas passenger and for short hop flights, particularly for time and cash sensitive freelancers and the self employed it may be enough to choose the competition.

Apart from this irritation, web check in was straight forward and quick with only hand held luggage. Queues did not appear to be long at the check in desks for those with checked baggage.

Boarding

Evening flights out of Melbourne can be problematic as getting to the airport along the Tullamarine Freeway in peak hour can be slow. On this evening traffic was clear.

Surprisingly the security queues were massive as the two operating gates struggled with a relatively light load of passengers. Being early, this wasn’t a problem but others on soon to depart flights were being paged from the lines by anxious check in staff.

An 8pm flight out of Qantas’ domestic Melbourne terminal is a dispiriting affair if you want to grab something to eat as the overpriced food hall is shutting down and the range is dismal to go with the high prices.

Fortunately Gate One at Qantas domestic has ample power sockets so you can continue working instead of moping around the overpriced and depressing food court.

Onboard

Another rattly old 767. While well maintained, it’s still showing its age. Comfortable seats again.

Service

Again the cabin crew was delightfully pleasant and friendly belying Qantas’ reputation for surly service.

This could have been because the flight was nearly empty, which makes the restricted seat availability at check in even more frustrating.

It didn’t appear that the restricted seats had anything to do with weight distribution as the cabin crew invited us to move wherever we liked after the plane had taken off. This was an opportunity to nab a seat at the front of the economy class cabin.

Being an evening flight a meal was served – a basic penne pasta topped with tomato sauce and a tiny chocolate bar. The meal was fine although its size was closer to a snack.

Sadly alcoholic drinks are no longer complimentary on Qantas domestic so a ginger beer followed by a black tea were the accompanying refreshments.

On time performance

The flight was slightly late getting away but had a straight flight into Sydney and arrived ten minutes early.

Arrival

With an on time arrival and only carrying hand luggage, again there was no need to worry about baggage claim.

Not worrying about baggage is handy at Sydney Airport as you need all your wits when dealing with the Dantean circle of hell that are the airport’s taxi ranks. For first time visitors to Sydney, the inept management of something as simple as a line for taxis is a taste of the ticket clipping monopolistic incompetence that infests much of the state’s business community.

For most people it’s easier to get the train out of the airport unless you’re lumbered with luggage or travelling in a group.

Overall QF490 was a straightforward and easy flight with little hassle apart from the large security queues in Melbourne and messed up taxi rank at Sydney airport.

QF490 – 21 Jul 12. Dep Melbourin 8.00pm, arrived Sydney 9.35. Economy class ticket $180.

Paul travelled to Melbourne courtesy of Xero for their Australian developer’s conference.

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Flight review – Qantas QF427 Sydney to Melbourne

A comfortable flight on Qantas’ gracefully aging 767s

The milk run between Sydney and Melbourne is a pretty routine affair and increasingly the service is like catching a fast bus.

Normally I fly Virgin Australia but as Xero were paying for my flight to attend their Australian convention I was happy to fly Qantas, it’s enough out of my usual routine to warrant a review.

Check in

Only having a day bag is an advantage with short hops along Australia’s East Coast and Qantas’ on-line check in is reasonably efficient.

An irritation with Qantas is the opaque way seats are made available. Depending upon your fare and frequent flier status you may not see all the available seats when checking in online so if grabbing a specific seat is important then it is worthwhile manually checking in at the airport to see what has become available.

Boarding

For all of Sydney airport’s sins, getting to the airport and boarding is fairly straightforward and for an 11am flight the security queues are short and efficient.

Another advantage with flying Qantas out of Sydney is their Heritage Centre in the T3 terminal where you can kill time waiting for a flight while looking at everything from the evolution of cabin crew uniforms to 1920s outback flight schedules. Just watch you don’t get too engrossed.

Boarding a Qantas flight is fairly clunky compared to Virgin Australia. This is partly due to their 767 craft only boarding from the front and not from both the forward and rear doors on the Virgin 737 aircraft. This also means queues down the aisles.

Onboard

The 767 aircraft are homely and showing their age. It’s surprising Qantas have kept flying them for as long as they have and the operating costs of these planes must be costing the airline a fortune compared to newer craft.

A positive with the older aircraft is the 2-4-2 seating is quite wide and comfortable compared to the equivalent JetStar and Virgin craft. Inflight entertainment is lacking although this hardly matters on a 95 minute flight.

Service

Qantas has a patchy reputation for cabin service, but the crew on this flight were delightfully friendly and helpful.

The inflight snack was a raspberry and white chocolate cookie or an apple (I had both) along with tea, coffee and softdrinks. The super-sweet cookie went well with a cup of tea.

On time performance

Sydney airport can create hell for passengers if the weather or various traffic restrictions conspire against them. This was not one of those days and the flight was away a few minutes late but arrived on time in Melbourne.

Arrival

With an on time arrival and only carrying hand luggage, there was no need to worry about baggage claim.

An advantage with Melbourne Airport is that cab ranks and bus stops are right outside the terminal although passengers using the Skybus service should note that the city bound buses usually stop at the Virgin terminal first so you may fight to get a seat unless you’re prepared to walk the 200m to earlier bus stop.

Overall QF427 was a comfortable trip and a good re-acquaintance with the flying kangaroo. The 767 aircraft though are desperately showing their age and while for passengers this doesn’t really matter on a short trips, it can’t be good for the airline’s image or operating costs.

QF427 – 20 Jul 12. Dep Sydney 11:00am, Arrived Melbourne 12.35. Economy class ticket $120.

Paul travelled to Melbourne courtesy of Xero for their Australian developer’s conference.

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