Demand for 12¢

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Flying mermaid

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I thought this was quite funny and wondered if it was a known problem.

I had booked an award flight for Master FM MEL- CBR return. he decided it would be nice to spend a few days in Melbourne before returning to the States, so asked me to change the return flight. This is easy thought I and went into the booking, changed the date, there was another award flight available, so selected that. Then I went to the payment and it asked for 3,500 points as expected plus 12c! Ok I thought 12c is a bit silly, but when you are struggling every cent counts, so pulled out the CC to pay (no ability to use more points to pay the 12c).

Tried two different CC to no avail. Kept coming up with a message saying I had to use the same form of payment as used initially.

At this point I gave up, phoned the magic platinum line, where it was very rapidly done for me, 3,500 points taken and I was told there shouldn't have been a 12c charge!
 
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Thought you were talking about the seat 12C on one of their planes. Didn't think any company would care about 12 cents.

It actually reminded my of when I was a teenager and my mother switched phone companies. For some reason there was a 5c balance outstanding so Telstra sent out a bill for it but as it was so low they said that payment was not required this bill. They went on sending out monthly bills for 5c with the same no payment required statement on them for about 2 years until we let them in on the joke.
 
As someone really smart once said:

¨To err is human. But to completely stuff things up requires a computer.¨
 
We must help QF get back into the black...
Sone bills which accept credit cards will not take smallish paynents of a few cents.
Try paying AMEX for a debt of Aus$0.02.
 
I had booked an award flight for Master FM MEL- CBR return. he decided it would be nice to spend a few days in Melbourne before returning to the States, so asked me to change the return flight. This is easy thought I and went into the booking, changed the date, there was another award flight available, so selected that. Then I went to the payment and it asked for 3,500 points as expected plus 12c! Ok I thought 12c is a bit silly, but when you are struggling every cent counts, so pulled out the CC to pay (no ability to use more points to pay the 12c).

There's a likely straight forward answer to this - most likely the taxes have changed since you initially booked. I've yet to see any carrier with online functionality that knows the difference between a ticket reissue and a ticket revalidation, therefore it assumes a reissue which triggers a tax recalculation. In your situation since it's simply a change of date, all that is required is a revalidation and no tax recalculation is triggered.
 
There's a likely straight forward answer to this - most likely the taxes have changed since you initially booked. I've yet to see any carrier with online functionality that knows the difference between a ticket reissue and a ticket revalidation, therefore it assumes a reissue which triggers a tax recalculation. In your situation since it's simply a change of date, all that is required is a revalidation and no tax recalculation is triggered.
That would make sense, although a little IF test or two would stop it happening.
 
That would make sense, although a little IF test or two would stop it happening.

It would not be a little IF test at all, there's a number of scenarios where a revalidation is all that is required.
 
It would not be a little IF test at all, there's a number of scenarios where a revalidation is all that is required.
I was thinking more along the lines of if total Amount < $1 don't request payment - would apply to all situations and surely asking for payment of cents is a nonsense thing...

There are clearly other incompatibilities here as it wouldn't accept payment of the amount, nor let me pay the charges with points (as they had been originally paid). In the end only human intervention could over ride the problem, with a cost to Qantas greatly exceeding 99cents (even if it had been a valid charge which it wasn't).

in the days when I worked for TAA and then Qantas as a software engineer it would have been raised as a bug report and fixed - granted that is many decades ago. These days only major errors seem to get fixed the rest are ignored....
 
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Qantas had given me a $400 voucher for some previous stuff ups and I decided to use it to visit a cousin in Wellington. I had to call up to use make the booking for payment with the voucher. The total price was something like $401.36 and the customer service dude was very apologetic at having to ask me to pay the $1.36 but I didn't mind. The $1.36 charge never came through on the card so maybe there is, or was, some tolerances or lee way in the system.
 
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