Qantas review by Jessica 2014-10-02

My husband flies internationally quite often. Usually when he flies from Las Vegas via Los Angeles to Melbourne Australia he always flies with Virgin/Delta. On one occasion he couldn't get a flight out with them and flew Qantas A380. He was so impressed with the take off and landing, how spacious the seat was and how good the food was that I too wanted to fly out in it. We usually fly with EVA air and Korean Airlines and have found them to be amazing. This time round we and our 6 weeks old child flew with Qantas. I called and made sure i got a bassinet as I didn't want to have hold my child for 13++ hours. Since i made the bookings directly with Qantas their partner airline was American Airline, I called the airlines and made sure i was assigned a seat and they said the bassinets are based on first come first serve basis. I explained that i was flying out of Las Vegas and they wouldn't be at Los Angeles early enough to be assigned that, so they assigned me a bassinet. When we got to the airport, our connecting flight was delayed and the staff only printed one ticket of our international leg. Once we got to the gate, we asked the staff there if they could print out the second ticket. They were happy to but after trying they said, "you're definitely booked but i just can't print the ticket" We would have to wait to get our second ticket once we arrived in LA. The whole time we had seats 52G,H (flying from LA to MEL) assigned to us as we had a newborn and that was the bulkhead. When we got to LA, the staff printed our ticket, whilst running to the bus I realized she had changed our seat to seat 49. Upon arrival at the check in gate I asked is seat 49 a bulkhead seat and the staff said no. The i explained i had called and booked to have the bulkhead and it was confirmed when i checked in at home. After 35 minutes of typing away at the computer, the staff finally said, I'm sorry your flight was delayed so we cancelled your seat. How can they do that???? She continued to say, there was another family with a child that needed it so we gave it to them. You can't argue with that. I said fine. I still don't understand how you can cancel someones seat when you know we have already checked in. I requested for a seat with a bassinet and i really didn't care which part of the plane it was. By this time i was getting upset but still keeping my cool. Upon entering the plane my husband and I glanced to see who was sitting in our seats ... guess what!! there was no family with a child but two elderly couple. Isn't the bulkhead a priority for parents with infants? We looked at the whole row, the bulkhead on the far right is 3 seater row with 2 people sitting in it with no infant and the one on the left side had the same no infant. the only family with infant was on row 52E,F. 3 bassinets wasted. Anyway we are now sitting at the back of the plane, the seats are tight not at all spacious. We explained our distress to the head steward and he was really nice and so was the crew on that flight. He even gave us a fast pass to get out of customs quickly. We were grateful for that, but in the end it didn't make a difference if we got through customs quickly or slowly as 3 of our 5 bags didn't make the flight. Im just happy the bag with my child's formula made it but totally disappointed with the whole flight. Since our child's capsule didn't make the flight Qantas was gracious enough to lend us one. Since they didn't have one at the airport we needed to wait for one to be sent to the airport. That took another 2 hours. What a day we had, we spent half our day just sitting/waiting at the airport. Call me Australian, but I'll never fly Qantas again. I'll be flying Virgin/Delta. We were told later that the staff working for Qantas in LA were all contract staff and they should have told the elderly couple to change seats as it wasn't a full flight.