[Disgruntled Customer]

I had the worst experience I have ever had flying with Qatar Airways on flight QR17 Doha to London on the 9 Jan 2013 and I wish to complain about it in the strongest terms possible in the hope of preventing anyone else having to experience such a nightmare of a journey.

On the occasion that I took this flight I was on the return leg of a return journey London-Delhi with Qatar Airways. I had been very sick with a nasty chest infection in the week prior to catching my first flight in Delhi, so was completely exhausted and travelling alone with a 20 month old infant, something that is already infinitely more difficult a task than travelling as a family group, or even with one other adult, the relevance of which will become clear.

At the check in in Delhi I was assured that I had been booked on two flights, Delhi to Doha (QR235) and Doha to London (QR17) as travelling with an infant, as per my original booking. However, when I boarded the second flight, after getting up in the early hours in Delhi and having taken a 4 hour flight followed by an exhausting 7 hour layover in Doha airport, I found that the seat I had been allocated at checkin was not a seat for someone travelling with an infant. It was an ordinary economy seat, not only having no access to an infant bassinet but having no extra seat or leg room for the infant to move around in either.

The staff on board said that, since the flight was full, the only thing they would offer do to resolve the situation was to ask people who had been allocated seats in the seating area with facilities for infants if anyone would voluntarily swop their seat for mine. Of course nobody was willing to do that. I was told that the reason for my situation was because family members of other infants travelling with parents/carers had been given priority over the seats with infant facilities over myself at check in.

This meant that I faced a 6.5 hour flight with literally no space for myself and my infant to sleep or eat. Staff brought the other infants on the flight complimentary packages of nappies/toys, but mine got nothing since she wasn't in the right seating area. I managed to eat a few mouthfuls of food by holding my tray above my infant’s head, since there was no room for both it and her to be in front of me, and she managed to sleep because I stood up for 3 of the 6.5 hours of the flight in order for her to sleep in our seat. I stood up near one of the exit doors, by the air attendent's pull-out seat yet none of the attendents thought to offer that I use the pull out seat until the plane was about to land.

By the time I reached London Heathrow I was so exhausted that I could hardly stand up, had to pay for a taxi home, and spent the next three days in bed suffering a relapse to the illness I had had the week before flying.

I cannot believe that a company could be so lacking in compassion or customer service as to prioritise keeping family members of infants travelling with more than one adult to care for them seated together in the same row over giving an infant travelling with only one adult carer a seat where there is access to facilities for infants. If this is the policy of Qatar Airways, or any other airline, I would urge them in the strongest terms to change it and save others the horrendous experience I underwent. After all, had one or two family members of the groups travelling on my flight been seated immediately behind the member(s) of their group seated with the infant, this would hardly have impacted their travelling experience the way being crammed into a normal economy seat with no place to sleep or eat did my infant and I.

I would suggest that people travelling with infants should either be guaranteed seats in the area with infant facilities or be alerted to the fact that the seats with infant facilities are overbooked ahead of flying in order to make an informed choice ahead of time as to whether they are desperate enough to get to their final destination to choose to travel in such discomfort.

I complained to Qatar Airways both via inflight form, via the 'tell-us' email they gave me on board, and via the complaint e-link on their website. It has been 3 weeks since the first of those complaints but I have received no response as yet.