Due to fly London - Doha - Kuala Lumpur in a few weeks with Qatar Airways.
I will have to wear a mask, face shield & gloves and their crew uniform looks like a hazmat suit.
Gone are the good old days of flying.
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Due to fly London - Doha - Kuala Lumpur in a few weeks with Qatar Airways.
I will have to wear a mask, face shield & gloves and their crew uniform looks like a hazmat suit.
Gone are the good old days of flying.
At least our Cam still has a job
Shareholders glad not paying these people surplus to requirements now ....employees (no matter how great they are) are just another commodity like fuel eh
@CamWallace_NZ
A tough week @FlyAirNZ as we farewell so many more great people from across our business. I wanted to mention and thank the fantastic FSM's who are departing. In normal times I travelled long haul every second week and these special people really made a huge difference. Thank you
Gone might be as well the days when it was more likely than not to catch every second long haul flight a bad cold or a flu from some fellow passenger coughing and spitting somewhere in your vicinity. At least for me this was sort of the long term average.
Sick people not anymore allowed to board the plane ... and all this PPE can be only useful to protect from colds and flues.
These new days might well have their silver lining ...
Have an enjoyable and save flight ...
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/a...ectid=12345607 More truly shocking publicity for AIR
Tourism changed forever. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/...ectid=12345416
Reported on Network news last evening Taupo is booming and that's before the school holidays even really kicked off properly. Business up 20% on last year.
Chatted with a guy today who said last weekend, (a week before the school holidays even started) he and his wife were turned away from a couple of the best Restaurants in Taupo because he hadn't booked in advance and they were at maximum capacity.
Taupo has always struck me as a great place. I would think the boom times there will continue as people disaffected by flying overseas and who are not very keen on getting on a plane at all, simply drive there for a good time.
Sure, there are winners and losers...driving distance to a major population area will do well at the weekends and holiday times, same in the South island, its the day in day out that has dropped and the average spend...it great for a local if you can travel at other times, just don't think the industry as a whole can survive on that...
Mind boggling. How is it be possible an airline realizes only after boarding that the plane is overloaded? If incompetence has a name it clearly must be Air New Zealand.
Obviously - the story how they treated their victims (you can't really call these people passengers, can you?) afterwards is hard to fathom. Getting a customer due to AIR's incompetence into quarantine prison and then asking them to pay for it? They should instead compensate the customers for the time they lost due to AIR's fault.
I shall put AIR on my "avoid at all cost" list next to Aeroflot and Air Malaysia.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/a...ectid=12345683 The mind truly boggles. AIR are flying only a tiny fraction of their previous services so they should have all the resources they need to look after the very few people they are flying really well, especially elderly vulnerable passengers. Its very hard to come to any other conclusion than there is a gross level of incompetence and lack of care by front line staff. Foran can issue all the weasel words and platitudes he likes but publicity like this really hurts and like you, many will go out of their way to avoid AIR in the future if at all possible.
"They offered to get off the full flight after the captain advised passengers it was overweight and off-balance, but other passengers were randomly picked off a list, she said."
An Air New Zealand spokeswoman said when removing passengers from a flight the airline had a standard process which took into account a number of factors, including ticket type and loyalty level...
Solomon said other passengers told they had to leave included an elderly woman, another mother and daughter, a mother with a young child and a group of four male teenagers.
The passengers were given the impression that passengers were requested via a random process - the reality is that they weren't at all, the passengers were profiled based on the fare and their airline status.
Therefore no one up the front of the plane was going to be asked to come off the aircraft regardless of any balance issue, no-one with a Gold and probably Silver status or anyone travelling with them (not just Air NZ but also under their obligations with Star Alliance, so those US passengers would probably have been kept aboard even if they had never flown with Air NZ if they had a Star Alliance status).
Pity those in the cheap seats - the offloaded passengers almost likely fitted the profile - the poor buggers, they were the acceptable collateral damage for Air NZ because they figured they were the least important.
Is it easier to off-load a few lower-fare passengers than to explain to a regular freight customer why you had to offload their valuable cargo?
Sure it is macduffy. It's apparently much easier to take an elderly passenger, who doesn't fly often, off the aircraft, then give her a traumatic experience and deny her food and water for eight or nine hours - whilst erroneously telling them as a result of being offloaded that they would have to pay for their accommodation, meals and other costs for 14 days in quarantine and relying on the compassion of the police to comfort her whilst in distress. I mean stuff does go wrong but a small serving of compassion from the staff of our national carrier might have made it slightly less distressing.
As Alan Martin of LV Martin once pledged "If it's not right, we'll put it right and it's the putting right that counts."
"When we first got off the plane they told us we could ring our family to come and pick us up. The elderly lady was very distressed and crying," Solomon said...
In an email to the Herald the daughter of the elderly traveller said the nine-hour ordeal was traumatic for her mum who was not a keen flyer at the best of times.
"It was after 9pm before she finally got to the hotel and 9.30 before she was given dinner. She was not even offered so much as a cup of tea or coffee. She is normally a very anxious person and is frightened of flying so the whole experience was quite traumatic...not helped by her being 78."
"She was quite frightened by the yelling and screaming of some of the people who were offloaded with her. Apparently an older male policeman sat and chatted to her and that was comforting."
Added her mum, "We were not given anything to eat or drink until just before we left the airport and that was a very small plastic container of water and either a tiny pack of chips or a bliss ball and we didn't get dinner until 9.30 and all meals were cold. It was a long time from check in at 12.30 until we got a cold meal at 9.30."
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/a...ectid=12345683
Exactly, Rep. Unfortunately, there isn't an emoji for expressing a blend of sarcasm and disgust to accompany my post #17775.
:(
No foul macduffy, it obligated me to provide context as to the sheer nastiness of the whole affair.
My mother doesn't fly often either and all I'm asking is whether we would the same thing to happen to our parents, grandparents, partner or child and be given the same level of disdain.