Trying (and failing) to cancel an upcoming flight
Hello Qantas flyers, may I ask your advice. I have a 4 person booking from HKG to MEL on Saturday in business. We are changing our travel plans and we're not sure when we'll actually fly that route. Easiest thing to do is to cancel the flight (even if it costs HK$2,000 per person) and make a new booking at a later date rather than keep rebooking the existing trip (at a cost of HK$1,000 per person). I've tried cancelling online, the website button is greyed out so it's not possible to do that online. I've been on hold with both the Swiss contact centre (where I am today) and the HK contact centre (where we will be tomorrow) and I am assuming that they both divert to the same place because both are approaching a 4 hour wait now with no suggestion that anyone will pick the phone up.
I have also tweeted them a direct message asking them to cancel the flights and have emailed them through their webform (which is really for general feedback I think) asking them to cancel the flights.
The flight leaves HKG on the evening of 8/2 but we will only arrive in HKG on 10/2 as we have changed our previous flight.
My question is: do we have to tell Qantas that we want to cancel the flight before it physically departs at 10.40pm HKG time on Saturday evening because we have been making every effort to do that and yet have not succeeded. I read the thread about unacceptably long wait-times on the phone with them and I see what you all mean. Oddly enough I called Cathay Pacific in HKG this morning to change the inbound flight to HKG and they answered in seconds when I'd expected hours wait there as I imagine they are rather busy with their own situation. Every airline's different of course so I'm really wondering whether I should continue to moderately stress about contacting Qantas to cancel the flight booking before it departs or if I've made enough good faith efforts (more than half a day of holiday at the moment) that I can contact them afterwards when they're answering the phone and deal with the refund and associated refund charge then.
Grateful for any advice from the experts!