Australian Man Put on Hold for 15 Hours with Qantas Airways

We've all been through it. We call a company and we're put through a series of automated answering machines, pressing numbers for certain options and hopefully we get connected to an actual person at some point.

Then there's the point where you're put on hold while the customer service agent attempts to solve your issue or connect you to someone who can. Sometimes the wait gets ridiculous and you're so fed up that you just hang up.

One Australian man, who made a call to Qantas Airways, claims that he was put on hold for 15 hours, 40 minutes and one second before he finally decided to hang up.

Andrew Kahn called the airline to confirm his flight from Adelaide, Australia to New York City. He was told to wait on the line until a representative could help him. He took that quite literally and out of curiosity, he wanted to find out just how long that wait would be

"I wanted to find out what exactly they meant would be as soon as possible," he told The Telegraph. "When it got to over two or three hours that was the point where it was like: 'OK let's ride this out'."

Kahn called the airline at 7:22 p.m on Wednesday. He hung up at 11:01 a.m. on Thursday. While he waited, he occupied his time while surfing the internet, sleeping for brief periods and even did some reading. A representative never came to the line to help him.

Still wanting to know if he all his flight plans were set, he called the airline back. This time someone did answer and he was told that he actually wasn't booked on the flight due to a code error. The error is what left him on hold for so many hours.

Qantas is investigating the phone call but they claim that they have no record of a call being put on hold for so many hours.

"In fact, our average contact center wait time during that period was under a minute and the longest wait time was 17 minutes," a spokesman told The Telegraph.

If Khan can produce phone records showing that he was on hold for over 15 hours, the airline will reimburse him. For now, the airline was able to fix his flight issues.

"The passenger's booking had been cancelled due to a system error, but has now been reinstated. We are looking into how this could have occurred and apologize for any inconvenience caused," said the Quantas spokesman.