This is by no means just a dig at Qantas who we travelled with on our trip to Australia and New Zealand. But a dig at all the airlines and their alliances and their interpretation of the excess luggage rules.
Around nine months before we took off on a holiday of a life time we started to crawl the internet for offerers and informations about our flight, airlines and the airports. We used various website such as :
Cycling forums : to learn about how people have been treated by air lines when they rocked up with a bicycle. There we also got some good hints on how to pack our bicycles.
The airlines website : which you pretty much needed to have a degree in understanding. Some of the websites simply didn't want to let you know what their polices are regarding "sporting equipment". Let alone how much it would cost, if it was included in the luggage allowance etc.
Friends : who have travelled recently with their bicycles.
A wealth of information there but not really up to date either, so we called around and everyone knows how easy it is got get information out of a call centre, even if it is local one.
We weighed all that up and ended with settling with Qantas as they suited our needed, time and ease of booking extra flight on. We then called up and talked a person at the costumer care centre at Qantas to get more details before we booked our flights.
Again we weighed everything up and then finally put our credit card detail in on the website and booked our flight,so far so good.
Then went clicking around on Qantas website some months later we discovered that the wording had changed from what we could remember what our we made our decision on. So we called them again and was told a different story compared to the first time we talked to Qantas. So we took careful notes so that we knew that we wouldn't get it wrong when we could book our excess luggage on.
Now that was one thing that annoyed us a little bit, we couldn't book our excess or rather our sporting equipment on before a week before departure. So we didn't have a clear idea before then, how much excess we had, how much was under the allowance and if at all could get our bicycles with us on our tour.
Two weeks before I called up again just to double check it all and while chatting to a friendly staff I learned that we were probably going to get hit for excess luggage for each of our fights we were about to take. London - Melbourne (Qantas), Brisbane - Christchurch (JetStar), Christchurch - Sydney (JetStart) and Sydney - London (British Airways) even though the last two flights was seen as one journey Christchurch - London (with a stop over in Sydney).
I managed to get transferred over to JetStar from Qantas, where I was told that the excess luggage on JetStar would be the same as with Qantas, since they (JetStar) is a under Qantas wing (pardon the pun). And therefore would accept Qantas luggage allowance, though that was now where to be find on JetStar or Qantas websites.
A week before we then called Qantas to book our excess on and we had been we organised and had figured out that we would have 15kg extra than what they allowed us to take. As you all know part of calling a call centre is the waiting time, which we have clocked up a fair bit now since we have called Qantas a fair bit.
Only to be told that we should do it online, not that isn't really a problem, we are happy internet shoppers, but Qantas website is crap, there I have said it and I stand by it. We tried numerous of times on two different OS and five different browsers and got absolutely no where. Sometimes we got the button that said "click here add extra luggage" sometimes we didn't but mostly we got a blank pages that our browsers either didn't display (blank page) or after a long wait got a page where we couldn't book any excess luggage on with.
So the very night before we were do to fly out we called up and said some tern words, after the obligatory long wait, and got them to take our payment details and put a note into the system about it. And braced ourself for the hammering of our credit card each time we entered an airport.
Though when we flew from Australia to New Zealand we didn't get charged extra, which of course confuses us and worries us more. Have we paid too much, too little and will therefore get hammered later or have we been taken for a ride and told a fib ?
So airlines PLEASE do make your excess allowance simple for us to understand and even your staff which I'm sure that you train periodically. I'm sure that this would solve some of the problems with badly behaved/confused/angry passengers, that I'm sure you all suffers from.
From what I have heard other travellers tell me, this is not just Qantas it is them all. But then again other times I have had simply great service from the airlines.