I Hate Jetstar

My 12 year old nephew flew from The Gold Coast to Melbourne at the start of the holidays. His Mum put him on by himself and there didn’t seem to be a problem from his end. At the end of his holiday with presents for him and his family in tow we attempted to check in.

First problem was that he wasn’t in High School. Don’t know about you but I started High School when I was 11. He is twelve and in grade 7 in Queensland, which is still part of their primary school system. With some stuffing about (and not a smile) they eventually agreed to fly him back home as they had already flown him down. It was made clear to us that they were reluctantly doing us a favour, otherwise we would have had to fly with him and then back.

So then we put the bags on. Now fair enough, there was an extra bag of stuff, but the lovely lady across the counter tells us that the excess baggage would be $98. We’d knocked back a $139 flight on Virgin for a $109 flight on Jetstar and they wanted to charge nearly $100 dollars for excess baggage. My wife got a bit annoyed and blurted out ‘you’re f***ing joking, this is f***ing ridiculous’ to which the lady responded ‘if you don’t stop swearing, we have the right to refuse you’ even though she wasn’t actually travelling.

Things cooled down, he needed to catch the flight. We decided that we’d try to get the bag up there some other way as we were so ticked off, giving them another cent was not going to happen.

Without the other bag, his lugguge was just under 3 kilos overweight. They charged us for it at $7 per kilo. We were so flustered at this point we couldn’t think straight. Later we thought that we might have felt better asking for the ticket and ripping it up in front of them. We spoke to the Virgin people while we were there and they said that up to 3-4 kilos over they won’t bother charging. For what we had it would have cost us an extra $20ish dollars and he would have been able to travel unaccompanied with the assistance of staff if needed.

We’ve travelled with Virgin a number of times before and it’s been great. That said, if you have zero expectations, are at least in highschool, have under 20 kilos of luggage and need to save less than $50 on you’re flight, by all means, take Jetstar.

Me, I’m not that desperate. We’ll never use them again.

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