nancypants

Hearing a rumour that earlier in the week a QF flight out of Maroochydore was delayed because family members of the flight crew (on staff travel) couldn’t be accommodated due to full flight. Story goes that they removed revenue pax to accomodate the relatives as otherwise flight was going to be cancelled

I have 2 questions:
1) anyone on the flight and know anything about it?
2) WTH??

conflict of interest disclosure: have staff travel benefits but never use them as prefer to pay and know I have a seat. Apparently not!!

LTN Phobia

Are you sure it wasn't a staff member on duty travel (as in positioning crew), rather than a staff travel passenger?

I've heard of crew members on duty travel bumping revenue passengers, because the flight they were positioning for would have been cancelled if they didn't get there. I think I have seen one case like that myself, although my recollection is vague because it was a while ago.

Sometimes the story gets a bit muddled up while being passed around...

nancypants

I’m told by one of the crew member involved’s colleagues (not my husband btw) that it was the wife and children of one of the flight crew

og

If this is true, it looks very poor. A pissed off crew member “blowing the whistle” and ground staff (somewhere) permitting this use of staff travel. It suggests an attitude deep in the airline that staff and families are looked after and the passengers get what’s left over. Something has gone wrong here with the balance between looking after staff and the airline’s core business (which I assume is moving fare paying passengers and making a profit).

MSPeconomist

Could the problem have been that the crew member threatened to refuse to work the flight if his/her family wasn't accommodated? If so, I would hope that this is grounds for termination and that the offloaded revenue passengers (aka customers) pursue this with both QF and the media as well as any applicable regulatory agencies.

It could have been fun if someone at QF had called the crewmember's bluff, allowed the flight to be cancelled, and then suspended/fired the crew member, leaving him and the family stranded.

nancypants

that’s exactly what’s alleged to have happened

i’m kind of surprised it hasn’t hit the press/any of the forums hence my question here

MSPeconomist

Some overentitled QF employee needs to be terminated.

nancypants

I will of course keep you all updated if I hear anything further

Often1

This is currently a fourth-hand usubstantiated rumor. Better to wait and see the facts before terminating people.

Dave Noble

So based on a rumour that something untoward might have happened, then there is an employee whose who needs to have their employment terminated?

There is nothing at all to show that anything happened that shouldn't have happened

Maybe nothing actually happened

LTN Phobia

Sounds like it's close enough not to have morphed then. That's not sounding good, unless it involved an extenuating circumstance that would justify it.

nancypants

hence my pursuit of some first hand accounts

flsusi

I work for a smaller US airline and enjoy staff travel privileges - and based on how our system works, I can’t imagine this happening. There are a lot of measures in place to make sure staff travel goes just as designed....whatever LEFTOVER seats are being distributed based on the priority system the airline puts in place.
our system would automatically trigger reviews and audit if there was an offload and a non-rev accommodation on the same flight, and the agent would lose their job quickly!

GoldCanyon340

Accounts of these events are usually way overblown by the time they hit online of course. However if there is any truth to it then an anonymous email or phone call to Staff Travel would be interesting. All onloads and offloads are recorded.

nancypants

yeah qantas makes their system a little bit complicated and uses onload priorities (for me around 52) and upgrade priorities (for me something like 28). Alan Joyce (onload/upgrade priority 1) is rumoured to be able to displace a paid F pax if necessary. In the vast majority of cases here even duty travel can’t displace a paid passenger, certainly not from business class unless something has gone massively wrong. Leisure travellers (other than Joycey) really shouldn’t be displacing anyone

as you say, it’ll surely all be recorded somewhere. Will be interesting what comes out in the wash

the source I have is pretty reliable, witnessed it all first hand and was at pains to not name names, but the steam coming out of his ears was visible from about a mile away all the same