Loyalty: variable

Long time follower, first time poster. Apologies for the length and depth of this post.. just felt there may be a few travellers who can relate to my experience.

As the name suggests I am a Silver QFF member and have been for 7 years. I hit gold twice but my travel is largely associated with short haul domestic flights on saver fares, with the occasional personal overseas trip on QF - we often find the destinations we are travelling to for holidays have much better and affordable J fares with just about anyone else but Qantas. Anyway.. anyone travelling to Melbourne this evening (14th Nov) would have been affected by the fog causing delays on landing into MEL, in my case a full cancellation of QF400 from SYD which was the only flight actually cancelled. I was travelling with my boss who is QFF Gold and they managed to get him on the 7PM but Alistair in the QS Sydney apologised for 'they

system wont let you get a seat on this flight' .. which I get as they'd obviously allocated the seats to gold and platinum before getting a silver onto that flight.. fair call and Alistair has always been super friendly and kind to me. My boss texts me before he takes off to tell me there were 5 free seats between rows 18 to 4 which I can also deal with, I was just glad to be on a flight home after being on a trans tasman journey since Sunday evening (it is currently 9.06 PM on Weds evening and I havent seen my family for 6 days). At least my seat on QF489 which took off 4.5 hours later than QF400 had my PAID FOR exit row seat of 14C allocated to me, "oh OK, they DO give the lowly Silvers a little crumb in an unfortunate and unavoidable situation" I thought. Well guess again readers who've made it this far.. Unable to board says the scanner when my paper boarding pass gets processed. Back to the line of the service desk (after being asked if I was actually meant to be on this flight)... Sara, kindly offered the likely reasoning of a family requiring to be seated together.. which made sense if not for the fact that row 14 is an exit row! Sara agreed, and kept searching away to tell me that I had been bumped from 14A to 30C .. because "your seat has been allocated to a Gold member".

Alright, "this is how it is sometimes" I thought. Sara for all I know spends more time away from her family than I do and probably gives a lot of hours to Qantas for free to make sure everyone gets to where they need to be safely and with a smile.. it could hardly be her fault. I did mention that it was pretty ordinary given the circumstances but before I could finish my sentence she was already onto the next passenger who probably was in the same boat as me. I had been up for 19 hours by the time I made it to the door of the humble 737 only to turn right and find Qantas employee in uniform sitting in seat 2C.

Now i understand that delays affect all parts of the business and yes, I am "only a silver FF" as I have been reminded plenty of times but if this isnt taking the p**s than I dont know what is.

Fair to say I am a very disenchanted (and a long time loyal) QFF'r.. just keen to know if anyone has had any similar experiences that has just had you sit back in 30C and think "I'm feeling loved like a cold sore right now". Thanks for listening.

Loads of Platinums get shafted from time to time, because there are so many more P1's in town.

Join the line and let this go.

I would say your loyalty got u on the flight, that is all that any airline would do. think if it was not even silver, you may not even be on the flight that day..Do not mean to be rude.

I am Gold with QF and Platinum with VA, travel plans get disrupted and the outcomes are not always what I want. Last travel I ended up paying to move flight because I got delayed due to Sydney roads traffic... The time before this, the move was without any additional charge, this time it was charged. Qantas moved my flights without charging, but have moved seats a few times...

No better or worse then other airlines considering, welcome to air travel. I have been suck in/out of Melb due to high winds many times, these things happen.