Qantas domestic business class experience

I don't know if I just caught them on a bad day but I found my Sydney to Brisbane business class flight with Qantas to be a pretty poor experience. I regularly fly this route on Virgin but thought I'd give my wife a chance to experience the Qantas business class offering for the first time.

STAFF SERVICE: It started with the greeting as we boarded - "Oh, you're here now". You'd think we were late but there were still 20 to 30 people behind us. We always get a warm greeting on Virgin and once seated, the crew person greets us using our names and introduces themselves by name as the person looking after us. This is promptly followed by an offer of water, juice or sparkling wine. Once seated with Qantas, we got "here's some water" as the bottle was plonked down. There was no attempt whatsoever to greet us in a polite way. As the meal was quite small, I asked for some cheese and crackers that had been mentioned previously. These were then promised but never delivered. Another good thing that Virgin does upon landing is to have a crew person stand at the rear of business class to block the aisle until business passengers have departed. This didn't happen on my Qantas flight so there was a scramble to the front as soon as the seat belt light was turned off. There was also no friendly farewell upon disembarking.

MEALS: I've had better meals in economy than what was served up. This is an area where Virgin seems to be well ahead in terms of meal quality and presentation.

Yes standards are indeed falling, my brother is a pilot with QF and says the thongs and shorts brigade have taken over, it's a miracle one of the last row mob didn't claim your overhead locker on their way through before you arrived, that often happens, saves them carrying oversized stuff all the way to the rear. I just don't think cabin crew attending to Business class should be that underwhelmed, if that's how they behave i think they should be reeducated with a stint at Jetstar so they appreciate their positions of Power.

I almost 100% agree with you. The inflight service, including cabin crew , inflight meal and seats, of VA is much better than QF. But the overall lounge quality of QF is extraordinary, though the arrival lounge is not accessible. Personally, I found it useless for a domestic flight, except for the overnight transcontinent flights while Qantas has already arranged special treatment.

I have only flown business with Virgin over the last few years and didn't realise how accustomed I was to their " Welcome Mr ... and welcome Mrs.." and other attentive touches. I assumed Qantas did the same. But, we just flew business with Qantas to HK and back and were shocked at the level of service, so if they serve up the same on their domestic routes, I'll stay away. I swore i'd never fly Jeststar after they threw the meal boxes at us on a trip to Hawaii a few years ago, but Qantas business wasn't very far behind.

@ David69 : Whoa! that experience from QF sounds bad and I feel for you and your wife that you'd to go through with that

Seems to be a growing issue, many of our middle management have asked the CEO and GM to reconsider our QF only policy due to many of the issues raised here, especially the poor service.

I have to unfortunately agree the meals are especially bad.

I would definitely say that the Luke Mangan menu on Virgin is much better than Qantas and seems the portions are bigger too!

I had the good fortune of receiving an invitation from Qantas to fill out a survey after what was a pretty dismal run of flights. I went into quite some detail on where I felt their shortcomings were. Whether any of it will be taken on board is another question. I gave pretty average scores for food quality/quantity and the IFE amongst others.

To put some perspective, how bad is this service level of Qantas compared to US airlines?

I almost always use Virgin domestic and one more thing is that VA have a barrier that prevents economy passengers using the forward toilet. I like that. As for US airlines, I don't think it's fair to generalize although United is pretty bad. But some are much better than others. But that isn't really the point. Poor QF standards cannot be rationalized by reference to poor standards elsewhere, otherwise let's also look at Air Zimbabwe etc. and conclude Qantas is OK if they can get over that sort of low bar.

I would agree with most of your observations David.

Does anyone know if QF monitor these posts? If not, they should be.