Flight Path DFW-BNE:
Fiji. We were in Fiji, not Brisbane, but Fiji! Florida went so well, without a hitch in fact. But now, after securing Qantas F seats with J service in the nose of a 744 DFW-BNE, not only was there fog in Brisbane, but while on approach to Noumea, the pilots learned that there was fog there, too! So we turned around and flew 2 hours
back to NAN. Two more hours on the plane on the tarmac to see if the pilots could get a waiver to go over their legal hours slightly, then they let us off and into the Air Pacific lounge because the waiver did not come through.
QF agent on the ground? Nope. Skype working to call QF in Australia? Nope. Called QF on lounge phone to rework our complicated itinerary? Nope. As soon as the agent saw it was an AA ticket, he said “Call AA.” Called AA on lounge phone to rework the itinerary? Nope. AA EXP desk could not see any award inventory and had no authority to override anything, since it was QF’s problem. Moreover, AA EXP agents claimed that they are not allowed to even talk to QF agents, only AA’s QF liaison can do that, and get this: they’re only in the office M-F 9-5! Here we were in Fiji on a Sunday (Saturday afternoon in the US), with no one to talk with to resolve the missed connections to AYQ for our one night stay, then immediate hop up to CNS for two nights.
After eight hours in the Nadi airport (not allowed to leave), a new flight crew arrived on a Pacific Blue flight, and we resumed our flight to BNE, arriving around 8pm, a 15 hour delay. We had convinced AA to rebook us to CNS the next afternoon, since we were planning to head there anyway, but QF had also rebooked us for the next day: BNE-CNS-AYQ-CNS. The AYQ-CNS was our originally scheduled flight, operated with the same plane as the CNS-AYQ flight. So much for seeing Ayers’ Rock during a 30 minute turnaround. We settled for continuing the remainder of the trip as ticketed, throwing out AYQ in the meantime, hoping that we might be able to add it back in at the end of the trip.