I'm not sure what 'its a systems issue' means in the context of the thread. 'Systems' don't have a separate life - they are the product of management's initiating, deploying and maintaining certain IT, and therefore anything that's a 'Systems issue' is, in reality, a 'management issue' (and I appreciate that neither of you were not including that too
).
This 'gremlin' has been reported in the past, and its being reported again - both here and to Qantas. Management either are wilfully ignoring it (conveniently, the GV prices are higher than the prices it should offer) or they re not up to their jobs. But we all know about the general quality of Qantas IT and how the work experience kids perform.
But in any event, its a Qantas management problem, not the IT. I can't imagine any IT manager being satisfied with such a coughpy system, so my guess is that the problem is rather high up the management chain.
In the context of the earlier argument of these voucher issues being a deliberate effort by QF to mislead customers or a series of poor implemntations/glitches then yes, it's a "systems" issue. In my view.
Are management responsible? Of course, but we've seen time and time again how dysfunctional QF IT are... we love to make jokes about the "Work Experience Kids" and have done for so long that these "kids" would have have school age kids themselves by now.
I am a firm believer that what we see as consumers is a mixture of "faults" from trying to build functionality on legacy systems (remember big GDS platforms like Amadeus and SABRE are still, more or less, the same things that ran airlines in the 70's and 80's... one of the big drivers for LCC's back in tthe day was the ability to move from these old school platforms to newr, custom designed systems that were sleeker and more functional. The airlines that did not wish to or see a need to integrate into the GDS systems like Southwest or early JQ etc did very well to stay away. You have a legacy airline like QF running on these legacy platforms that also have to "speak" to partner and other airlines using very old technology, protocols, formats and standards (eg: things like 6 digit PNR's, limits of character fields, encodings and the like are all legacy) that some things are probably very hard to do.
I have a background in IT and I also know a number of people with backgrounds in res systems like SABRE and also spent some time dealing wiht a company in the US who offered services to airline clients such as duplicate booking matchings, scanning reservations for pax on no fly lists and all that kind of stuff (the big one was finding duplicate or multiple reservations for same or similar flights). I wouldn't claim to know the inds and outs of these GDS's or building platforms on top of them, but I can bet it's far from simple.
I'd also bet that QF's investment in IT has probably been subpar and there may well be solutions for many of these things offered by Amadeus that QF either won't purchase, or doesn't wish to for their own reasons, or maybe require customisations that are far from easy.
Sure, management bears the brunt of these things. They also, to a degree, bear the results of these (how many missed bookings and thus revenue does QF have every time the booking system goes belly up, or the webpage falls over, or a GV can't be used for a flight, or whatever?).. That's money and they care about that obviously, but it's almost certainly not as simple as it may seem from the outside.
I'd also submit from decades in IT in large organisations that there are many priorities being bandied about from people like marketing, yield and revenue management, loyalty and all the rest with wish lists, targets and yes.. budgets to implement.
I would bet you there are people at Mascot pulling their hair out seeing discussions like this online or even seeing things like the website issues, the lack of features, or features going wrong, or whatever and stymied from doing hings. It could even be a matter of multiple bodies being involved (in one previous life I worked as a consultant to a company who was doing work for a large well known telco who had all their systems under the control of a third party vendor (*cough* IBM *cough*) and decisions and requirements from the telco side were pushed through the middle consultants and then had to be implemented by the systems folks. Let's just say it was a nightmare of epic proportions to get even the simplest thing done at times. I could talk to the people who needed to do the work. but to get it done I had to navigate through 3 companies worth of politics, paperwork, procedures and processes.. honestly it was a nightmare.. and in all of that there was ONE GUY who knew the whole deal and kept things oing and without his knowledge the place would have fallen to cough (let's just say that guy was on a significant retainment salary). My point being that often in big institutions like QF it's often far from simple to say lket's do this then make it happen, even more so when you're dealing with rela time systems, MUST have 24/7 reliability where release a code update that goes bad can have massive reprocussions even with all the testing in the world. It happens. We've all seen it.
Am I defending QF here? It may seem that way. No I'm not. I'm a customer.. It irks me to tears at times the issues we've all faced.... but we've all faced enough obvious glitches and bugs with various things to be aware that almost certainly all these issues we're dealing with, specially with Gift Vouchers, are most certainly NOT deceptive or intentional by the company.
Slowly QF do make improvements to various things - it must be remembered... we'd like them instantly and all the old issues fixed totally, but they have rolled out some actually good changes over the past few years and that needs to be recognised.
Unfortunately dealing with vouchers, the limitations and the Far Queue are not one of them. sigh. I still live in hope they will improve!