Hurtigruten review: Customer service - Tullamarine

Hello

We Booked a wonderful once in a lifetime bucket list trip to Antarctica with Hurtigruten who had booked our flights with Qantas/Latam to Buenos Aires. Departure was March 1st and we arrived at the airport at 6.30am for the 9am QF151.

Qantas Customer Services

Tue, 28 Feb at 2:17 pm-

Why were we allowed to check-in if a NZesta was required. Once we arrived at the Desk around 7am, they checked Hans German Passport as visa waiver country for a NZeTA

The women at the check-in took us to your customer service counters which were all closed at this time. They did not even open any of the windows to help. One women with Blonde hair made a half hearted effort and showed us the app that we had to download.

Now imagine we have less than an hour to figure out this application and get a response. Adding to this stress we are both over 65+ and frantic. Asking for help was pointless as they claimed other people needed help. Yet, we had to wait 15-20mins behind a customer who was just talking about nothing in particular at one window which opened for him. I even asked the counter staff to help us, by this time everyone had checked-in who was waiting in line if he could use his phone and help us, he was nervously looking at the customer service and kept repeating we cannot use our phones.

Eventually, staff simply just closed the flights and told us to contact our agent even though there was a later flight at 1.20pm. We could have been able to catch our connecting flight with Latam. We were asked about the option for one of us to take the flight.

In the end it was our responsibility to find out about the NZesta. But since we were in transit it did not even cross our minds as a German Passport is visa waiver country.

Our option after this dreadful ordeal was to buy new flights at a cost of $6500 to meet the cruise on time.

Information should be provided for NZeTA clearly like the USA ESTA for all bookings.

Qantas should take some responsibility for not providing a service.