Budget = shit
The wonderful thing about modern air travel is that people can travel far and wide relatively cheaply. The problem is that the service tends to decline - no seat allocations, no food, no in-flight entertainment, no check-in for sporting goods! Wait, no sporting goods? WTF? That’s right, I have just had to leave Timtim’s bike here in Townsville (I’m on a kiosk in the boarding lounge) because they wanted to charge me $7 a kilo. Seeing as it’s a mountain bike that would’ve been about $120. The thing is, I could’ve spent $10 extra and gone with Virgin, who are like, “pffft… whatever… chuck it on”. The Jetstar guy asked me if I’d travelled with his airline before. I said, “Yes, but never with a bike, and never again”. Except for on the way home from Tassie, which I’ve already booked. Mental note: don’t buy a bike in Hobart…
August 24th, 2006 at 9:24 am
Stinge!!!! Pricks!
My mate Peeto was lucky enough of working on the camera team for Australian Princess, like I said lucky. They had fly to the UK to film all the girls meeting the coked up poncy princes. They took all their equipment thinking “Aw yeah couple of extra hundred bucks”. Quantas charged them $13 000 for extra baggage! Snap.
August 24th, 2006 at 10:59 am
This is what happens with a monopoly, which is what Qantas has in reality. Virgin is not close to being sufficent competition for it to have any effect on Qantas’ behaviour. Qantas is consistent in having a “stuff you” attitude about everything. The reason they are expanding JetStar is not so that you get tickets “for a fraction of the price” - now that is seriously misleading advertising - but so that they can charge you all sorts of extras during the flight. The reason the Australian government won’t allow Singapore Airlines on the Sydney LA route is because Qantas has a virtual monopoly - the only competitor is United and anyone who’s flown on United would never fly it again. Last year I was flying to Melbourne for work and thought I would do the right thing so I bought a cheap ticket. At the airport I was told that the plane was an international service, that I would have to find my own way to the international terminal, it was running 12 hours late, and I couldn’t change my ticket. I pointed out politley that I had bought a ticket for a plane leaving at 10.30am and not one leaving at 10pm, but no go. I had to buy another ticket. There are 8 million stories like this about Qantas in the naked city.
August 24th, 2006 at 1:45 pm
um, slightly off topic - tom, i fixed the wireless prob.. it was saying the same thing at uni, I was like WTF? so after fiddling around in all the preferences etc, I finally go to info help and Im standing next the the computer dude when, of course, I work it out - we were looking in the airport tab, which was saying connected.. but the VPN tab, where we didnt look, was saying idle - just hit connect and hey presto! pretty sure will work at home too..
apart from looking a bit stupid at infohelp, that’s pretty dominant, o?
now to write to paper critiques to pass in tomorrow….
August 24th, 2006 at 2:27 pm
Hey geoff, 4/5 is still a ‘fraction’, isn’t it?
Z, good job. Hopefully that’ll work there too, although I remain doubtful. What preferences tab were you looking at? The online one, or on your computer?
August 24th, 2006 at 3:38 pm
on my computer, silly! Im going home soon, so I’ll give it a go.. (downloading papers here, just to be on the safe side tho!)