Comments not permitted on Qantas Articles..?

Just out of curiosity, why aren't comments permitted on a number of Qantas articles being published recently, yet the Rex & Virgin articles are a free for all.

Recent examples include:

- Qantas pushes back restart of international flights to October 2021

- Qantas flags 2H21 restart for flights to Japan, Johannesburg

- Here's how Qantas will bring back international flights

Seems very odd..

Very odd. I noticed this on some of the Covid and Vaccine articles but first time noticed this on Qantas content too.

Articles on Virgin and REX destinations and product seem to be fine though?

Because Qantas is the biggest sponsor of ET and the biggest elephant in the room can't handle criticism.

There's zero bias here, it's just the flow of news stories – as a rule, the most recent stories replace older stories. This happens regardless of the airline.

For example the article re Virgin opening their the club lounge in Melbourne to golds/plays/business was very quickly bumped down and out by an article about Qantas offering snacks again in economy or something equally as unimportant.

That's totally incorrect. Looking at our system, the Virgin story was published at 11.30am on Dec15 2020 and it remained the lead story for that day. The following day we ran two Bloomberg pieces on tech/motoring and Singapore (the second of which would have nudged the Virgin story down the hierarchy from the two feature blocks to a tile); the day after that, we ran stories on BA halting Sydney & Bangkok flights and another story about Virgin confirming its Canberra lounge would reopen.

So there was no Qantas story bumping down the Virgin one. I suspect you're thinking of "Qantas upgrades economy meals and drinks", which was published on Feb8 2021. But even if those Virgin and Qantas stories were back-to-back in the timeline, if the Qantas story was published after the Virgin story then the Qantas yarn would be in #1 spot because that's how you do 'news'. And I'd also suggest that upgraded economy meals and drinks for all QF passengers would be far from 'unimportant', especially as we so often have readers pointing out that they fly domestic economy even when on business.

Likewise with the new Adelaide lounge, its now hard to find, replaced by numerous Qantas news articles.

No mystery there, either. Virgin opened its lounge on Tuesday arvo and that was our lead story for the entirety of that day. The following day we kicked off with Qantas announcing plans to restart Jo'burg and Japan by 2H21, so that is a fresher news story and so it takes #1 spot; then we've since had Rex announcing first details of its Boeing 737 business class meals plus yesterday's Qantas half-yearly financials which yielded two news stories.

Bottom line: there's no conspiracy here, it's just that 99% of the time we publish stories in time-based order, where newer stories slot in ahead of older ones, and every story eventually marches down the page.

Utter nonsense. Can you point to a single Qantas advert on this site (apart from some ads automatically placed by Google Ads)? Nope. No airline 'sponsors' Executive Traveller, and even when we do have a campaign from an airline this does not change our reporting – the simple reason being that if it did, then we'd lose the trust of readers and our overall value as a platform declines. I've seen that happen to other publications through my decades as a journalist/editor, and that's why it won't happen here. We have always reported news in an objective 'straight bat' fashion.

Simple answer: we don't enable comments on every single article. There are some websites which allow no comments at all, and others enable them selectively. In the case of Executive Traveller, it depends on the article and my judgement as to the likely comments, the value they'll add to the article, if they'll be on topic or if they'll just become a place for people to have a rant, which is often the same rant being made over and over, from one article to the next. This in turn can see the comments thread spin out of control and require more moderation than we have time for.

COVID and vaccination are the best examples of this: after a while we saw the same handful of people repeating the same heavily opinion-laden and often misinformed comments, and the same replies to those comments, and the same replies to those replies. After a few months it just gets tiresome to read, it adds no value to the actual article for other readers.

At Executive Traveller we aim to produce informative content that's relevant to our audience, and comments are intended to add value to the content – by which I mean being considered, useful comments. Comments are not a place for people to indulge in their own tiresome rants and argy-bargy, their own negative sledging, and when there's a good chance that will be the case comments are either enabled with moderation (although this then requires time and vigilance in checking each comment) or disabled entirely.

Hi ja90ck – my reply to KW72 in this thread largely addresses the thinking behind when we enable or disable comments, but this is far from 'exclusive' to Qantas articles. There are many articles for which we will either allow comments subject to moderation, or disable comments completely.

We've been doing this a bit lately for articles about COVID vaccines and related issues (eg travel bans) where experience shows that previous articles on those topics result in comments which are little more than rants that'd be better suited to a user's own social media platform rather than using Executive Traveller as their platform.

Those three Qantas articles you cite are the only Qantas articles in the longest time which have had comments disabled, and you can see a common thread connecting those articles – they're all about the restart of international flights.

My experience in writing most articles and reading/moderating comments informed me that we're likely to see the same comments made when Qantas announced the July 1 restart (for which comments were enabled) with relatively little value-add but leaning more towards personal "I'm going to get this off my chest" rants, the same tired old complaints and criticisms which frankly don't add value to the article.

We've heard it all before, we've read it all before, and if somebody wants to bleat about it they can put the article onto their own Facebook page and bleat there, on their space, instead of using Executive Traveller as a platform.

It's also worth adding that the more time we have to spend managing comments (moderating, removing) the less time we have for creating the content which is why people come to Executive Traveller in the first place. This is why many websites disable commenting on all articles.

I don't want to do that, because we so often get great insightful comments on articles, which is why I've adopted a more selective approach to enabling comments, depending on the topic of the article and the quality of comments it's likely to generate.

Looks like it may be your laptop, as the two articles are not in the same column from what I can see. The VA Lounge column looks to appear sequentially in date, with 2 x QF, 1 x REX and 1 x VA article listed.

It's not your laptop, but it is a function of the home page design. "What the future holds for Qantas first class" is a locked-in promo tile in the left column for stories with longer shelf-life, just like the Hilton status match one above it. Both of those tiles stay in place while other news stories flow around them. Two days ago the Virgin ADL lounge story would have been higher up, now it's lower down, as newer stories are published. We try to regularly rotate the promo tile stories while ensuring their content doesn't date, but we should try to change 'em more often.

Thanks for taking the time to reply David - appreciate it and now understand the reasoning behind this, which makes compete sense!

Appreciate the reply and engagement with everyone David. Thank you.

Sure you run the risk of lots of downvotes from the ET community when you criticise Qantas, but the ET site itself seems relatively unbiased.