After a horrid start to New Zealand domestic services a month ago Jetstar has offered a $NZ 50 voucher to any of its passengers who are more than an hour late reaching their destination through the airline’s fault until 9 October.
Several million customers of Jetstar’s Australian services might have welcomed this sort of pledge too.
The airline’s insistence that passengers had to check in at least 30 minutes before departure or loose their fare seemed grossly unfair when the carrier paid no penalty if it was late.
But the NZ promise means Jetstar risks having to give around $8350 in vouchers away for every flight that is more than an hour late for the next 3 months. The Jetstar low cost model fights for every single dollar, so the offer shows how shaken it has been by the Kiwi consumer rebellion.
The offer doesn’t cover weather delays, which is just as well considering Queenstown is a large fraction of its network. Jetstar is now having its A320s certified to the same precision navigation standards as the competing Air New Zealand flights at the south island’s tourism epi-centre. This will allow them it to use the fog prone airstrip and keep clear of the mountains that shape the approach and departure and especially the single engine emergency paths to and from its shortish strip.
3 Comments
Good to see Jetstar getting a shellacking by the Kiwis. Jetstar’s arrogance and one-sided arrangements with its passengers is incredible. So what happens after October 9? Back to normal (FUBAR)?
Even if Jetstar did miraculously admit it was their error you’d use up most of the $50 as you probably can’t redeem your voucher online, and would have to go through call centre with their “if you want to speak to a person” surcharge!
JetStar is dead in the water in NZ, they will hang around no doubt but like Qantas before them will lose money here.
The CEO also announced today they were re-positioning half an airplane (fitting as most NZers think JetStar is half an airline) to NZ to help with reliability, adding $25m/yr further in cost and decreasing any potential return.
Their launch is a lesson for all Aussie companies and executives that think the NZ market is simply the same as Oz and Auckland is another Sydney. NZ companies have learnt to their cost the reverse is not true. e.g. Air NZ and Ansett or Telecom and AAPT
Mistakes made so far:
- Fired most(all?) JetConnect (Qantas NZ) frontline customer service staff that would have known what to expect and how to handle any unforeseen events better than raw recruits.
- Used an Australian comedian with a blatant Australian accent and Australian scenery to front their marketing campaign. How did they expect that to go? Couldn’t they find a cricketer to bowl underarm or something?
- NZ airports (departure lounge size and number of air bridges) are not designed to turn around full 180 seat aircraft in 30mins.
- NZ’s weather is always interesting unlike Australia’s. Fog, snow, wind all can play havoc with a schedule, especially in…..
- Queenstown which is a tricky airport and should not be at centre of any airline’s schedule.
- Underestimated Air NZ, which unlike Qantas is at the top of its game, wrapped in the national flag and a known airline killer.
- Disastrous PR by multiple Australian based representatives with Ozzie accents. To paraphrase “JetStar is a great airline!!! You don’t know how lucky you are NZ!! Whats that? Customer complaints? Late flights? Schedule changes? Overbooking? Rude Staff? Police called regularly to our checkin counters? They are all the lying customers fault. Time for some re-education NZ! We are JetStar and we are awesome.”
Almost all of these mistakes Qantas made itself, which is what really beggars belief. Did Qantas staff set JetStar up to fail or did JetStar simply not listen?