To sum up, the creation of more than one PNR shouldn't happen, or be allowed to happen, esp if the intention wasn't to do more than one flight booking PNR.
Disagree.
How does QF know this if a booking is not completed?
I see this as a feature more or less. It may be being poorly implemented(though I found it worked fine myself given the system emailed me). As noted by others this is hardly new in eCommerce applications.. eg: "We notice you have X items in your shopping cart.. would you like to check out now?" or "Complete your hotel booking at XYZ" (I've had both of these from various companies).
An online application is not to know what the customers intentions are just because they do not complete a booking. Indeed, the intent may even be to create and "hold" if you will the booking, or their session died and they need to come back to pay, or whatever.
Now, in your case where 2 extra PNR's appeared to be created during the process of booking one flight - it's hard to have a guess as to what happened there without knowing more, but it's not a big deal if they autocancel anyway.. and they will - many GDS systems like Amadeus Sabre etc do regular sweeps to match multiple bookings for the same flight and other such things as well as unticketed PNR's will expire automatically also. It was most likely some sort of bug that caused it (it's QF after all
) but pror to a booking being ticketed, the system doesn't know that 2 extras are wrong (let alone unwanted) at that point.
I had this happen when i went to book a seat on a particular flight and I got to the payment page before I did a 180 turn in my thinking and decided to use points... but since I'd filled in customer info the airline (not QF) website sent me a few reminders about that booking. I didn't worry about it because I'd booked with my changed plan, and it was no issue, and as expected it went away.. but up to the point of it expiring, that airline may have assumed that I still wanted that flight (and at some point a sweep may have figured out two bookings for the same flight, but one ticketed and the other nogt, and just deleted the non ticketed one).
I guess what would be handy for such sites (not just QF, but in general) is to have an option to "Just Cancel this booking" (which I did not have with my QF phantom, or the other airline referred to above).. now sure *I* knew they would also cancel wihtin 24h so I wasn't at all worried and just let them go, but in the case of unexpected duplicates it might be handy if you open up the "booking" and have a pop up or something say "This booking isn't yet ticketed yet. Would you like to continue to confirm and pay for this booking or Cancel it?" and that way you could clear it yourself. That's just a thought though.
