Sounds like you were on a very cheap industry fare such as an ID90, as otherwise the "minimal refund" would be over $1000. One of the drawbacks of flying on such very cheap fares are the terms and conditions (which include no guarantee of class of service). If you care about this, there are lots of other, more expensive, fares which would have given you stellar QF treatment. Thousands of other pax got hotel paid for, upgrades and even rerouted on other airlines, at QF's expense; there is lots of evidence that QF in general does give a damn about their pax. In fact threads right here on FT indicating how much better QF is at this (irrops and pax amenities) than other airlines.