Originally Posted by
docbert
The simpler answer would have just been to travel a day earlier - Friday's QR908 was diverted to Melbourne due to weather in Sydney. Could have saved yourself a lot of time and trouble
In practice, it looks like you were actually very lucky to made it out - QF499 got airborne at 10:59pm - less than 1 minute before the Sydney airport curfew kicks in which would have delayed you to the next morning.
Would have been amazing to have diverted on QR908 to MEL :-) Agreed very lucky indeed beating curfew!
Originally Posted by
fakecd
considering you were on seperate tickets/bookings i am surprised it worked out so well. No offense but you had multiple miracles on your side, one of which is frieny QF agents who cared (they could have closed checkin and stuck by rules regardless of delay to MEL)
i wonder if they would have given you seat on next morning flight if you missed qF499 free of charge. Most likely not
So QF transfer desk closed at 9pm just as my wife arrived (staff were in but they weren't opening the door and offered ZERO help), its only our familiarity via this thread that allowed us to make some informed choices. With the QF desk closed my wife boarded the transfer bus, and the bus driver kindly left pretty much immediately when she explained the situation. It was the domestic QF check in staff who went above and beyond. QF check in staff told me to get in a TAXI as they would be the quickest, and they would hold check in open... when i arrived everything was officially closed but a lovely lady was waiting as promised.
Personally I don't think QF would have re-accommodated us on a new flight had I missed QF499 - our tickets were BA reward business class, so that probably would have made things worse.
As a data point we found QATAR were completely useless, they couldn't do anything with our BA issued QR ticket in DOHA eg change anything being 125 stock, and in the air QR also wouldn't contact QF in the air, and the Wifi on the a380 was completely useless, i was unable to check in/use google flights etc for the 4 hours i tried.