Qantas strikes back at Choice’s Shonky Awards, slamming watchdog’s ‘wrong’ data and out-of-date info

Qantas has bitten back at the consumer watchdog after it crowned the national airline the year’s most disappointing Australian company in the 2022 Shonky Awards, with Qantas declaring the anti-accolade was “shonky” itself.

The Choice Shonky Awards names and shames the worst products and services on the market, with the 2022 gongs handed out to Qantas (crowned “The Spirit of Disappointment”), as well as VetPay, Steggles Chicken Nuggets Boosted with Veggies, Bloomex, and Zega Digital cookware.

“Whether it’s an airline that makes redeeming flight credits a nightmare, a finance product targeting distressed pet owners, cookware that doesn’t cook properly, processed food dressing itself up as healthy, or a florist delivering dud bouquets, we’ll continue to call out companies that do the wrong thing by Australians,” said Choice CEO Alan Kirkland.

Kirkland continued that Qantas “appears to have gone deliberately out of its way to win a Shonky Award this year”, slamming the national carrier’s “unfair and unworkable flight credits, lost baggage, excessive call wait times, and delayed flights”.

But a Qantas spokesperson told SmartCompany that Choice is spruiking figures that are “just wrong”, continuing that the besieged airline had ‘fessed up to the actual “performance figures, both good and bad” this year as it battled multiple PR crises.

“These awards are clearly out of date and the data Choice is using is itself a bit shonky,” a Qantas spokesperson said.

Choice found just 47.1% of domestic flights took off on time in the month of July, but Qantas responded that it had “beaten Virgin for on-time flights eight out of the past 12 months, and in some months that’s been by a significant margin”.

Researchers at Choice drew their own comparison to Virgin when they claimed Qantas’s call wait times were 21 minutes on average, and up to 51 minutes in the worst-case scenarios.

“By comparison, Virgin came in under a quarter of that average time with five minutes wait, and a maximum of 13 minutes,” added Choice travel expert Jodi Bird.

But this is triple what the average actual wait times are at its call centres which have hovered around seven minutes since June, the Qantas spokesperson says, less than half the pre-pandemic wait.

Further, Choice slammed Qantas for “difficult and confusing for their customers to use flight credits for cancelled travel,” continuing that the airline is “forcing many people to spend extra money, putting limits on available flights, being unable to make bookings using credits online”.

But Qantas said that was wrong — customers can use flight credits when booking online.

It seems not everyone could work it out, however. Queenslander Mark Harding told Choice that if he could afford to, he would “take legal action” after losing $1000 worth of travel credits when they expired as Australia’s borders remained bolted shut.

“The problem is that I have no idea how to resolve my complaint,” Harding said.

Choice also cited an investigation in April of this year that found Qantas was sitting on $1.4 billion in unused flight credits.

But a Qantas spokesperson says that customers have redeemed more than $1 billion in COVID-related flight credits so far, adding “the conditions for these are the same or better than they were pre-COVID and we’re actively encouraging our customers to use them”.

“No one is disputing the fact we had issues earlier this year, and we apologised for that, but it’s disappointing that Choice failed to acknowledge the impact that COVID-19 and border closures have had on the entire aviation industry,” the spokesperson continued.

Indeed national carriers have been melting down worldwide. In June British Airways announced that they’d slashed 10,300 flights between August and October, and 1500 during the month of July, in addition to slashing 10% of all flights between April and October.

In Canada, it’s dismally similar scenes. Air Canada has lost so much luggage that someone has dedicated a Twitter account to it, with the page retweeting hundreds of people trying to track down their belongings.

About 48% of Air Canada flights were delayed in June — incidentally, a similar figure to Qantas.

But Choice’s Kirkland had a decidedly different take on the torrid years of the pandemic.

“2022 has been a difficult year, with Australians living through a pandemic, a slew of natural disasters, and a cost of living crisis,” he said.

“The last thing people need is businesses that rip them off but unfortunately that’s exactly what we’ve seen in this year’s Shonky Awards.”