Jetstar is playing hardball with passengers who turn up late for check-in and the punters aren’t happy about it.
Like most domestic flights, you have to be checked in half an hour before take-off time; international flight usually have a two-hour timeframe. Every time you book a flight the terms and conditions are clearly set out, so those times should come as no surprise to anyone.
However, since Jetstar has been strictly enforcing the times and making wayward passengers pay for new tickets if they are late, customers have been having a right old whinge about it.
I’m one of those people who hates to be late. I always make sure I’m at the airport with time to spare and there have been a couple of times when I’ve been thankful of that buffer zone: delayed flights out of Melbourne before ours and queues like I’ve never seen, for example.
Last October I was in Australia for a month or so. We were at Sydney airport waiting to check our bags for a flight to Adelaide and had made a point of being there with time to spare. However, there were other travellers who weren’t so well prepared. In fact, there were a whole bunch of them who didn’t even join the queue until the first boarding call was made for the flight.
So what happened to those disorganised idiots? Staff from the airline stood in front of the check-in counters calling for passengers for that flight to come to the front of the queue. Result? Those of us who played by the rules got to spend more time waiting while those who thumbed their collective noses and the terms and conditions of their tickets got to jump the queue.
Come on guys, it’s not rocket science: be there on time.
Good on Jetstar for enforcing the rules.
ON THE WEB