In the latest blow for Australia’s national carrier, Choice has awarded Qantas a Shonky Award, claiming it has downgraded itself to the level of a budget airline.

The consumer advocacy group revealed the recipients of its 17th annual Shonky Awards this morning, recognising the “worst of the worst products and services taking advantage of Australians”.

Announcing the recipients, Choice CEO Alan Kirkland said the group would prefer not to give out the awards, but products and services keep surfacing that need to be called out.

“Whether it’s an airline that makes redeeming flight credits a nightmare, a finance product targeting distressed pet owners, cookware that doesn’t cook properly, processed food dressing itself up as healthy, or a florist delivering dud bouquets, we’ll continue to call out companies that do the wrong thing by Australians,” Kirkland said.

Qantas was the biggest brand to receive a Shonky this year, accompanied by VetPay, Steggles Chicken Nuggets, Bloomex and Zega Digital cookware.

Slapping the airline with the tagline “spirit of disappointment”, Choice said Qantas appeared to be going out of its way to win a Shonky.

“Qantas has always sold itself as the premium Australian domestic airline, and Australians have been very proud of Qantas as a premium airline,” said Choice money and travel expert Jodi Bird.

“But what we’ve seen recently is Qantas taken down to the level of a budget airline.

“They had the worst rates for flight delays, and their baggage handling has really been poor in the last year. People are still paying premium prices, but not getting premium service.”

In July this year, Qantas had the worst rate of on-time domestic arrivals of any Australian airline with only 47.1 per cent of flights arriving on time, according to the Australian government’s Bureau of Transport, though this number has since risen to 69.2 per cent for September.

Further explaining why Qantas had reached Shonky status, Choice outlined issues customers have had using travel credits accumulated from COVID-related travel cancellations.

In April this year, Qantas and Jetstar combined were sitting on around $1.4 billion in unused flight credits and future bookings, with customers complaining that the system wouldn’t let them book lower-cost flights.

The group also accused Qantas of steering customers towards choosing a credit voucher by not being upfront about refund rights.

The airline’s call wait times also got a mention, with Choice revealing it had conducted a “mystery shop” of airline call centre wait times in September 2022, and found that people needing to get in touch with Qantas by phone would wait 21 minutes on average for their call to be answered, and up to 50 minutes.

Although an improvement on 2021 wait times, Qantas still lagged behind competitor Virgin, whose customers waited an average of five minutes, and a maximum of 13 minutes.

A spokesperson for Qantas said Choice’s Shonky awards were “clearly out of date” and claimed the group’s data was “itself a bit shonky”.

“We had several months of poor performance earlier in the year, but it’s improved significantly since August and we’re back to our pre-COVID level of service,” the spokesperson said.

“We’ve been very transparent with our performance figures, both good and bad, but Choice is using figures that are just wrong.

“We’ve beaten Virgin for on-time flights eight out of the past 12 months, and in some months that’s been by a significant margin.

The airline claims its call wait times are less than half of what Choice is claiming, and that its customers have redeemed more than $1 billion in COVID-related flight credits.

“The conditions for these are the same or better than they were pre-COVID and we’re actively encouraging our customers to use them,” the spokesperson continued.

“No one is disputing the fact we had issues earlier this year, and we apologised for that, but it’s disappointing that Choice failed to acknowledge the impact that COVID and border closures have had on the entire aviation industry.”

In August, Qantas CEO Alan Joyce apologised to customers for the poor performance, announcing initiatives to address mishandled bags and on-time performance, blaming high levels of sick leave and an industry-wide labour shortage.

The company said it had hired 1500 new people since April, with more to come, and threw in a $50 flight voucher to Frequent Flyer members to say sorry.