Passenger kept on hold 'for 15 hours'

Being on hold for more than 7 minutes is unbearable. But 15 hours is something else.

An Australian man says that he was placed on hold for that long by Qantas Airlines, when trying to confirm his travel plans. Long enough to have done the entire flight he had booked from Adelaide to New York.

Businessman Andrew Kahn said he was kept waiting on his mobile phone for 15 hours, 40 minutes and one second before he finally hung up. "I hung up in the end simply because I had had enough," he said.

Mr Kahn ssurfed the internet, briefly dozed off and studied during his mammoth wait. "I also managed to read Bazerman & Moore's seventh edition of Judgment in Managerial Decision Making - more than 200 pages of advanced master's level reading," he said.

"I think the wait time was simply my determination to see what exactly they meant by a representative coming on the line as soon as possible," he told the Herald Sun newspaper.

Mr Kahn says he rang back later on Thursday and spoke to a Qantas representative. He then discovered there had been an error with his booking.

A spokesman for Qantas has been quoted in local media as saying the company had no record of a 15-hour wait time, and that the maximum wait during the period in question was 17 minutes, with the average under one minute.