Shocking average Qantas call wait time revealed

Qantas customers are enduring excessive delays to get through to the call centre, with CEO Alan Joyce admitting the average wait time is a staggering one and a half hours.

Tom Elliott raised the issue on Monday and has since been inundated by calls and emails from listeners who’ve been impacted.

Speaking at a Victorian Chamber of Commerce lunch on Tuesday, Qantas CEO Alan Joyce said the airline has hired more workers for its call centre, but acknowledged there’s a problem.

“The average wait time is an hour and a half and we shouldn’t be at those levels for general calls, half an hour for premium calls,” he said.

“The thing we’re having to do is trying to get people to do a lot of the administration themselves if they can. Nearly 60 per cent of people who ring the call centre could be doing it on the website or the app.”

Tom Elliott labelled the issue “appalling”.

Aviation expert Brian Wilson said Qantas is frequently changing flight times at the moment, and the email customers are receiving when that happens tells them to ring the call centre.

“The issue is that if I change Tom Elliott’s flight and you have a query with it, you can’t actually handle that query through the website,” he said.

“I think it’s a bit rude to say ‘Well you really should be doing it on the web’. I mean, Qantas is a premium carrier and that comes with the obligation of providing a premium service.”

And it’s not only customers who’re being kept on hold by the airline.

“It’s also common for flight crew to wait for up to an hour to speak to people in crewing and operations, so it is a fairly widespread problem,” Brian Wilson said.

Press PLAY below to hear more about the Qantas call centre wait time blow outs