We recently had my daughter's wedding here in Sydney, and our cousins flew in from Christchurch. They booked their flights months in advance for 10 people on FlatStar. Lo and behold on the day they were due to fly at 5:30am, this useless excuse for an airline cancelled the flight, forcing them to spend over $5k on re-booking on another airline.
Sure enough, guess what happened when it came to getting a refund? You guessed it, hours online to some offshore company that barely speak English and have no authority to do anything, but are trained to endlessly take up hours of your time. Eventually the answer comes back of course, 'no refund available' because there was a flight the next day (which was actually delayed). No excuse was ever given as to why the flight is cancelled.
Why Qantas would attach its brand to this piece of junk is beyond me. Right from the very first, when standing in a queue in a suit in Hobart, and being charged $50 on the spot - presumably because I was the only person in the line with a suit on, CrapStar has been on the 'avoid at all costs' list. Staff trained in how to be infamously rude to customers, arrogant, sultry and generally people who wouldn't last more than 5 minutes in a job where people were actually fired for poor performance, you wonder what the pilots are like.
Anyway, it doesn't all go their way, they have now lost my company's business. Hardly enough to dent Qantas' bottom line, still a decent $300,000 annual company spend that has gone to Virgin whom I love to bits. That, and a Qantas Gold member for over a decade who walked out the door and you have no idea why. Imagine how many more there are.
Good riddance I hope they ground you permanently.