Melbourne Lounge Closed with NO warning

Arrived for a flight today and found both the Melbourne lounges shut. Rang the VIP team for P1 FF and was told all lounges open - they had no idea. The CSM on the flight also said all meant to be open. The offering in economy for a lunch flight was a mainland cheese back, 4 pieces of cheese and for basic crackers. I could buy them in the fridge at Woolies. Tickets have not reduced in price but service is going downhill at a fast rate!

I suspect the airlines are still struggling so you'll pay the higher fares to prop up the business as much as possible (to be expected I guess!) with costs cut from other offerings like meals etc... . Post Covid it does present an opportunity perhaps to be more efficient ( i.e offering meals through per-selection before day of departure so they only load on what is needed) to save on costs (probably wont be passed on to the PAX)but am guessing the current experience will be here to stay given travel wont be back to pre-covid level for some time. Upside is you didn't have to pay an exorbitant amount for some cheese and crackers if you happened to feel peckish :)

Being Melbourne, I would suggest that it would be as a result of the current restrictions in place in that city. It's not post-Covid in Melbourne!

Given greater Melbourne is still under restrictions the Qantas lounge would have capacity limitations & couple that with extremely low passenger volumes since we can’t travel... the lounge is shut.

You will likely get better value by flying the competition but I suspect that you and most people won't therefore Qantas has no incentive to do better.

If you are not prepared to change (who you fly with) then Qantas won't change (their service offering) either.

Melbourne has a maximum of 75 people seated indoors. Based on that I’d say it’s not able to re-open just yet.

Same thing happened to me on Tuesday. I get that they have restrictions on the number of people indoors in Melbourne but surely the solution is to open the Qantas club, Business Lounge and Chairman's Lounge (ie 215 pax) and then triage access based on status level?

Every time there is the slightest change in restrictions during this crisis Qantas has used it as cover to unilaterally withdraw or reduce services. You never know what services you're going to get despite them having been promised to you by Qantas as part of the deal you get when you buy tickets off them with allotted status credits, linked to particular status tiers. This behaviour might have been acceptable when they were extending everyone's status for free but not when they are back to a world where you have to earn your status tier and different tiers are granted based on different earn rates.

This unpredictable service is one of the many reasons I'm cutting my 2-3 SYD-MEL return flights per week in favour of Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Webex etc. I lost 45 minutes of productive work time on Tuesday as a consequence of not having a place to work at the airport, with the lounge closed and food court tables fully occupied. That could've been avoided with a bit of notice and half decent communication from Qantas.

Had the same experience. The new Qantas seems to be hiding behind COVID a lot. On top of the lack of communication I’m really not sure the extra $80-$100 more than it cost to fly VA is really worth it.