Qantas feeling world pain and wont return my calls

Despite a revenue growth of 2% to $7.92 billion, Qantas has joined the list of airlines being beaten up by the economic smack-down. Profits are down 66% to $210mm for the second half of calendar 08 from $618mm the previous year. Shares are currently in a trading halt - at time of writing - pending an announcement on a capital raising (full news story here care of SMH). I would not normally run a post on declining results for an airline like Qantas (because that is what we have online newspapers for) but in this case it reminded me that I have been trying to get in touch with Qantas media/comms staff and have heard nothing.

Last week Qantas announced a new $10 million customer service training centre. This peaked my interest as I have regularly commented that Qantas appears to have a culture of process rather than service. I wrote to the media contact at Qantas (bottom of the press release) and asked if they would be interested in giving me a briefing on the new facility. That was last Friday. As of today - Wednesday - no reply.

Now it is possible that they think I am so negative on Qantas that it is not worth giving me a briefing. But that would be an unfair assessment of the BOOT. While there are plenty of critical comments on the blog about Qantas - especially on the glitches/failures on of the in flight entertainement system - I also have positive comments such as my post "In defence of Qantas" and have rated Qantas as number 5 on my list of top 5 airlines. But even so, surely they would want to talk to any commentator - especially negative ones- about service improvements. The other possibility is that that the Qantas media/PR team simply do not reply to bloggers. If that is true, then they have their heads in the old media sand. There are so many examples of social media impacting on Qantas as a brand. My blog is the number two hit in Google (on my results) for "Qantas VOD". Message board and info-blog FrequentFlyer.com.au is the number two in Google for "QFF" (the shorthand for Qantas Frequent Flyer). Twitter is awash with commentary about Qantas etc etc etc

I hope the real answer is that they just haven't gotten round to writing back yet. If so, Qantas - if you're listening - email me.