Zolex

Not to mention that the ME3 like to censor A LOT of content!

obduro

Mild rant - it's really annoying that I can't upgrade one leg of a journey to F with cash, just because QR doesn't offer F on the aircraft for the other leg. Really ridiculous their systems apparently won't let the ticket be repriced, and you can't even book it online anyone (you could before christmas!)

Very first world problems but it is a problem they don't seem to want to solve.

Dr. HFH

Which, of course, likely means that the market is telling QR that it's not a problem which really needs attention as much as some others.

IAN-UK

Life sometimes throws .... at us.

The things we have to deal with !!

amnicoll

I do not know where you are looking but in the past I have often come across fares on sites like skyscanner for business class Manchester/Doha and then First Doha/Bangkok when searching for first class fares between Manchester and Bangkok

obduro

Yes, you still seem to be able to book that particular route with J/F and historically (up until about christmas) you could do the same on most routes connecting onto DOH - SYD but now I can't find any that work. Will just have to ask at the airport.

obduro

True. I suppose I'm just used to BA who throw cash upgrades at you like they are going out of fashion, but then again QR J isn't a bad place to spend 15 hours.

richtemark

So now I can happily add my experience with the QR customer service. Sorry it became a bit long but the story is quite entertaining, in my opinion.

Flying from Beijing to Berlin via Doha last night, our plane was held over Doha at arrival due to weather conditions (it was raining; according to the flight attendant, that regularly causes chaos in Doha because "they are not used to rain"). Captain later decided to divert to Dubai World; we landed there, refueled and, after one hour, flew back to Doha.

By the time we reached Doha, our connection to Berlin was already gone. We were greeted by QR ground staff at the gate and given new boarding passes for the next flight to Berlin at 2pm in the afternoon (it was 8.45am). We were even informed that we could have a complimentary meal in the Marche Restaurant. We ate, we went to the lounge and when we later wanted to go to the gate for boarding we found out to our surprise that, on this Saturday, there are no other flights to Berlin except the one we missed in the morning. The lady at the gate had given us boarding passes for the next day.

So we went to the transfer desk. Initially, we were offered a hotel voucher. Since we needed (and, by the time I am writing this, still need) to reach Berlin as soon as possible, we asked for a different connection via another airport (there were plenty of flights to different cities in Europe). The service agent offered us a connection with the 5:10pm flight to Vienna and then onwards with Austrian Airlines so we would reach Berlin by 9:45pm. Perfect! He asked us to wait until he got the reservation confirmation by Austrian Airlines.

45 Minutes later I came back to the service agent who was still waiting for the confirmation. I told him that, in the meantime, I found out that there was no flight from Doha to Vienna on this day. "No No", he assured me, "of course there is". I asked him to show me on the departure monitors. Long story short, he could not: there is no flight to Vienna on Saturday afternoon. The service agent showed us to another service agent and got back to do other duties (playing with his smartphone, it is).

The next service agent asked us why we did not come earlier because there was a flight to Istanbul that we could have taken; from Istanbul she could have booked us to Berlin in the evening. Well, what could I say?

Anyway, this service agent again searched her computer and came to the conclusion that there was no other possibility to go to Berlin earlier than taking the Sunday afternoon flight. I then showed here that there was indeed an earlier connection via the night flight (around 2am) from Doha to Munich. It then took another 10 minutes just to convince her to book us a Lufthansa Ticket from Munich to Berlin on Sunday morning (and not Sunday afternoon which would have included another 8hrs stopover in Munich).

To sum up: Qatar offers great service in the air, especially in Business Class, but I also came to the conclusion that the people they employ on their service lines and their home hub have absolutely no idea of what they are doing. I could tell another story how I spend, up to now, 2:30 hrs on the phone just to add 2 animals in hold to an existing QR booking but that will be the story for another day.

wheatbeer

Thanks for letting me know. Do you recall how full your flight was?

One of the trip reports on the AKL thread mentioned they ran out of champagne before take off. For a 17 hour flight! It must be that the outbound flight drunk more than half of what was loaded.

I really wish I could've flown HND-DOH on the return but there was no availability on the dates we needed.

Regarding main courses - I am pretty sure they ran out of the beef fillet on my flight and I got the last one. The chap adjacent to me was really pissed as he didn't get to have the soup, appetiser or main.

I don't know why they don't load more food on this flight. The CSD on our DOH-AMS said it often happens on NRT-DOH.

Would be interested to know if they prioritise based on status or not. I always thought they just go front to back.

amnicoll

The acid test of customer service is how well a company responds when (as there will be ) problems.

gpeso8

Not a complaint per se, but I just flew LAX-DOH-SIN J on QR and found the crews on both my flights to not be very warm and also somewhat disconnected.

The crew from LAX-DOH disappeared after service and when I used the call button to ask for some tea no one responded so after sitting there for 10 minutes I got up and located an FA in the galley, same thing happened again later in the flight, not the end of the world, but kind of annoying. I've also never been on a 777 so empty in my life, 14 people in J and probably less than 60 in Y!

Maybe my standards are high since the bulk of my flying is on SQ, BR and NH but something felt very off on both flights.

noirvie

Just wanted to confirm, in relation to earlier discussions in this thread about changing destination when in transit at DOH airport, that the transfer desk at DOH was able to change my acceptance status from checked-in back to open, which would then allow changes to the next flight. This had been the issue preventing jrobin from changing the destination of their next flight when transiting Doha. In my instance, there was no availability left in fare class D for my desired alternative destination, so I did end up flying the original routing. This was flying a oneworld explorer fare, in business class, but the system seems to be the same across classes.

My experience on various issues discussed in the thread:
I didn't ask Qatar to make the routing changes themselves (as there wasn't availability, it was a moot point).
Didn't try making the changes at Al Mourjan, the transfer desk was right next to the lounge so it seemed easier to cut out the middleman.
As with jrobin's experience, I wasn't able to be short-checked just to DOH when checking in at the origin.

SingaporeDon

I too was surprised to see the crew chatting away and eating sandwiches while standing around in the galley. I would have thought they would eat their meals more discretetly

Traveller999

Does anybody know why CS not answering to emails at all at the moment? Or they onlky not answering me ;-)
I did send two separate cases to the "tellus..." email with an follow up after 10 days as I got no reply at all. Now 10 days did pass again - no reply....

Thank you in advance for any suggestion / information

tboons

QR836 delayed for 5 hours. Request for a reroute as I would miss my connecting flight back to Singapore on a different PNR. Business class is full and have to pay for a downgrade to economy.