Passenger Snuggled Up to Urine-Soaked Neck Pillow During Qantas Flight From Bangkok After Child Had Accident On Previous Flight

A passenger on a Qantas flight from Bangkok to Sydney says he snuggled into a travel neck pillow for several hours before realising it was damp with urine after it fell in a pool of liquid which hadn’t been cleaned up from the previous flight.

The man and his partner say they then had to fight to get a full refund from the Australian flag carrier after Qantas initially offered them just 10,000 frequent flyer miles for the ordeal.

The Kiwi couple were returning home from the Thai capital on December 30, with the first leg of their journey taking them from Bangkok to Sydney for the nine-hour flight in urine-stained surroundings.

The unnamed couple told the NZ Herald that when they first boarded the Qantas plane, they placed a few items underneath the seat in front of them, including a Duty Free bag, a Qantas-supplied travel pillow and some other items.

When the man went to retrieve the pillow a little later, he noticed that it was damp and appeared to be stained on one side, but the couple initially just thought it was from a water spill and thought nothing more of it.

The man went on to use the pillow for several hours until another passenger went to get something from underneath the same row of seats and discovered a pair of children’s underwear.

“Now we know that we have been sitting in urine for a 10-hour trip,” the couple told the NZ Herald.

They called a flight attendant over to explain what had happened, and a supervisor on the flight initially offered them 10,000 Qantas points.

The couple rejected the offer as it didn’t “make up for the fact we were sitting in biohazard waste” and instead escalated their complaint to Qantas’ head office, requesting a full refund.

Famously stingy for doling out compensation, Qantas wrote back to the couple on January 10, initially rejecting their request for a refund because, despite their urine-soaked surroundings, the airline had still got them to their destination as contracted.

But when the local media got in contact with Qantas, the airline changed its stance and agreed to offer a refund as a ‘gesture of goodwill’.

The couple acknowledge that it was probably the third-party cleaning company’s fault in Bangkok for what happened but argue that Qantas contracted the company and it is, therefore, the airline’s responsibility.

Last March, a Kiwi passenger brought a ‘deceptive advertising’ lawsuit against Dubai-based Emirates because the airline sold Business Class tickets which advertised newer, more comfortable seats that weren’t routinely available on flights from Aotearoa.