Hawaii stranded Jetstar passengers say they will never fly the airline again
An AAP report says that the Jetstar passengers stranded in Honolulu for two days after their plane broke down have sworn they will never fly with the budget airline again.
About 300 Australians were left at Honolulu airport for two days after Jetstar botched attempts to get them home, with two aircraft flying the tired and frustrated passengers back to Melbourne and Sydney on Sunday, with some travelling for three days to get home.The trouble for around 100 passengers began on Friday morning when their Jetstar flight was cancelled after an electronics problem prevented the plane leaving Australia to pick them up in Honolulu.
The passengers were moved to a Saturday morning flight but the problems worsened when the Airbus A330 scheduled to take them – and another 200 passengers – was grounded.
Jetstar spokesman Simon Westaway said the plane was inoperable because of a fault detected in its fuel gauge, adding, “It’s an unusual fault and required a number of tests on the indicator inside the left wing where a large section of fuel is held, requiring the wing to be drained of fuel.”
He said passengers were kept informed of the problems, were looked after at Honolulu airport and given overnight accommodation, but angry passengers at Melbourne airport had nothing but criticism for the airline’s customer service.
Father-of-three Braham Shnider has sworn off the airline after the ordeal, telling Ch 7, “I certainly wouldn’t fly with them again,” adding, “I would say there would not be a single soul on the aeroplane that would fly with them again.”
Other passengers, who did not gave their names, echoed his sentiments, with one woman saying, “I’m very tired, and Jetstar is very terrible at customer service”, adding, “Everybody had something different to say, nobody knew what was going on” and another woman said, “I will never fly Jetstar again, ever.”
Simon Westaway denied passengers had been left in the dark, saying, “The airline rejects accusations that we haven’t sought to get the problem rectified as quickly as possible”, adding, “We used other airlines to move customers and people have got to understand that there are not myriads of services between Honolulu and Australia each and every day.”
He told CH 9 “We think we have done a pretty good job in difficult circumstances”, adding, “We think people will continue to fly with us.”
A News Limited report this morning says that Jestar is scrambling to defend its reputation arguing that it had spent up to $1 million trying to limit delays caused by the faults affecting half its fleet, adding that a review would investigate passenger complaints that they had been kept in limbo as they spent hours at the airport waiting for a flight home.
It explains in more detail that Jetstar’s problems began when a flight scheduled to leave Hawaii for Sydney on Thursday morning Honolulu time (Friday morning AEST) was cancelled because the plane that was due to fly the route – an incoming flight from Australia – had not arrived.
An avionics problem in one of the carrier’s Airbus A330 aircraft had combined with crew rostering and curfew issues to prevent the plane from leaving Sydney.
The airline eventually opted to book Sydney passengers waiting at Honolulu’s airport into a hotel and put them on a service to Melbourne early on Friday, but bad turned to worse when the aircraft sent to operate the Melbourne flight suffered a 15-hour delay because of a faulty fuel gauge.
Simon Westaway said, “We’ve had really good solid performance with our long-haul operations since last November, and we just had one problem compounded on top of another”.
“We essentially isolated the problem we had on that Sydney-Honolulu return by utilising the Melbourne service and the likes of Air Canada and we actually chartered a Qantas Boeing 767 on the Melbourne-Denpasar return service so we didn’t have substantial rolling delays through our network.”
About 40 passengers were rebooked on an Air Canada flight, and the delayed second flight landed in Melbourne yesterday morning, allowing some Sydney passengers to fly home on a Qantas domestic service. The remainder came on the normal Jetstar flight to Sydney.
Report by The Mole from AAP and News
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