Qantas Fixes Ongoing Reward Flight Ticketing Failures

Over the past year, many Qantas Frequent Flyer members have redeemed their points for Classic Flight Reward bookings on partner airlines – only to later discover that their flights had been cancelled without their knowledge.

In many cases, this was the result of Qantas failing to issue or re-issue the customers’ tickets on time. This caused the partner airline to automatically cancel the booking. To make matters worse, many of these customers then wasted hours trying to contact Qantas – but were still unable to get their original flights reinstated.

Clearly, this ongoing situation has been unacceptable for Qantas Frequent Flyer members. But there’s now finally some good news!

Qantas has now committed to fixing this ongoing problem and is taking concrete steps to ensure Classic Flight Reward tickets are issued correctly in the future. It has already set up a dedicated team to monitor reward bookings and assist customers with ticketing issues. The airline has also extended an apology to affected customers.

What exactly has been happening?

For more than a year now, there have been regular posts on AFF (and elsewhere) complaining of flights disappearing from Qantas Classic Flight Reward bookings without warning.

Qantas Frequent Flyer members would redeem their points for flights on partner airlines such as Qatar Airways, Japan Airlines or Cathay Pacific, but would then lose their “confirmed” flights through no fault of their own.

This is not a normal thing that would happen when making a redemption booking with other frequent flyer programs.

In some instances, Qantas never issued a ticket in the first place. (Sadly, it seems this was still happening as recently as last week.)

At other times, Qantas would correctly collect the payment for the points, taxes and carrier charges, and issue a ticket. But it would then fail to re-issue the ticket when this was required following a subsequent schedule change, resulting in customers losing their previously confirmed seats.

Some Qantas customers were notified of a change to their ticket, but were told they did not need to do anything. At other times, the customer would not receive any notification whatsoever that there was a change to their booking. By the time these people realised they had lost their flights, it was often too late to make alternative arrangements.

Sadly, this has been far from an isolated incident. It has been an ongoing and systematic problem that Australian Frequent Flyer has written about multiple times over the past year, such as in this article from August 2022.

There have also been many posts on our forum from members who’ve lost their confirmed Qantas Classic Flight Reward seats. Here are just a few examples of AFF threads about this issue:

• Qantas ticketing delays – likely risk of losing booking. (18 February 2022)
• Qantas Bookings not Ticketing? (16 March 2022)
• Rewards seats changed from QR to QF without approval and from J to Y (29 April 2022)
• Qantas can’t find my booking ref to refund points (15 May 2022)
• CX and QR flights disappeared from MBB on OWA RTW classic rewards booking. Need urgent advice please!! (18 May 2022)
• Classic reward being cancelled by Qantas! (5 June 2022)
• I’ve been QF’d and QR’d again and again. (26 July 2022)
• Qantas cancelling 5 of my ticketed Oneworld Award Booking Business Flights – not taking payment and ticketing in time (4 September 2022)
• Ticketed Qatar Flights Disappeared (16 September 2022)
• OWA “Schedule Change” (27 September 2022)
• Qantas FAILED to re issue a ticket in time Qatar have CANCELLED flights (28 September 2022)
• My Reward Booking has disappeared and I’m supposed to fly tomorrow morning (29 September 2022)
• Schedule change of Qantas flight results in partner airline seat cancelled via Qantas classic reward (6 October 2022)
• Award booking cancelled due to Qantas Error – AGAIN (27 October 2022)
• Reward seat withdrawn after being paid for (6 November 2022)
• Qantas cancelled flight through their ticketing error: what to do… (4 December 2022)

What has been causing this problem?

When you book a flight, a reservation is created when the airline issues you with a 6-digit PNR (Passenger Name Record). But you won’t actually be able to fly until the airline has “ticketed” the booking. This occurs when the airline collects payment for the booking and issues a ticket number. For Qantas tickets, this is a long number beginning with “081”.

Generally, an airline will automatically issue your ticket within a few minutes of completing the payment. But if an error occurs or your ticket is flagged for human intervention, it might be placed in a manual ticketing queue or not processed at all.

The problem here is that most other airlines have ticketing time limits. If a reserved flight is not ticketed within this time limit (which could be just a few days), that airline will automatically cancel the reservation for that flight.

If a schedule change requires a ticket to be re-issued, Qantas’ failure to do this before the ticketing deadline will result in the partner airline automatically cancelling the flight.

Passengers were often unaware that their tickets had not been correctly issued – nor that they needed to be. But even when savvy AFF members have spotted that something was wrong, they’ve often struggled to reach someone at the Qantas contact centre who understood the problem and was able to fix it.

In some instances, just a minor change to one of the flights in a multi-sector booking has resulted in all other flights in the booking getting cancelled.

When does an existing ticket need to be re-issued?

If there is a significant change to any of the flights in a Qantas Classic Flight Reward booking, Qantas also needs to re-issue the ticket. A significant change that requires a ticket re-issue may include:

• A cancellation of one or more flights
• A change of airline
• A routing change
• A change of flight number (when the operating airline is not Qantas)
• A date change (when the operating airline is not Qantas)
• A change to the flight’s departure time of more than one hour (when the operating airline is not Qantas)

The following changes do not generally require a ticket to be re-issued:

• A change to the arrival time
• A change to the departure time of less than one hour
• A change to the operating aircraft type

If there is a change to a flight number, date or departure time and the flight is operated by Qantas, the ticket can be either re-issued or simply revalidated.

Impacted Qantas customers have struggled to get a resolution

Over the past year, we’ve contacted Qantas to try to get a resolution for many of the members who reported issues on the AFF forum. Many of these customers did eventually get flights reinstated, but only after we got involved. Many of them had already spent weeks trying to get their flights reinstated, but the Qantas contact centre had been unable to assist and regularly just offered a refund. (Unfortunately, that’s not particularly helpful when there are no longer any alternative reward seats available!)

“When we’ve been made aware of past ticketing issues that are impacting upcoming travel, we’ve gone to great lengths to ensure our members arrive at their selected destination as close as possible to their original itinerary”, a Qantas spokesperson said.

But the underlying problem of confirmed Classic Flight Reward tickets getting randomly cancelled has remained… until now.

Qantas has acknowledged the problem and apologised

The good news for Qantas Frequent Flyer members is that the airline is now well aware of this problem and is fixing it.

In a statement to Australian Frequent Flyer, Qantas acknowledged that reward seat bookings are its frequent flyers’ favourite way to use their points, and that the strength of its network of partner airlines is very important.

“When our partner airlines cancel or change a flight, the reward seat bookings on that flight will usually need to be re-ticketed,” Qantas said.

“The restart of the aviation industry has seen significantly more flight cancellations and schedule changes across the entire aviation industry.

“Qantas Frequent Flyers who hold reward seat bookings on partner airlines have been impacted by these disruptions, and we know that there have been some recurring issues caused by delays or errors in ticketing by our contact centre agents. We sincerely apologise to these customers.”

What Qantas is now doing to fix this problem

Qantas today announced a range of new measures to prevent these issues from reoccurring. Here are the key changes…

A dedicated team to monitor Classic Flight Reward bookings

As the first step, Qantas has set up a dedicated team of trained staff to proactively monitor Classic Flight Reward bookings. This team will proactively re-issue tickets, if required, after they are notified of schedule changes.

Qantas says that almost all of the new ticketing issues it is now seeing are the result of partner airline changes or cancellations that occurred last year, before its new process was in place.

“We now have a dedicated team with experienced agents to proactively monitor and re-issue reward seat tickets on partner airlines. This means that almost all flight changes or cancellations are re-ticketed within 24 hours,” Qantas told us.

“We are also opening a direct line of support for our members whose reward seat bookings on partner airlines have been impacted by a flight change or cancellation, so they can be confident that their ticket is confirmed.”

A direct support line for customers with reward flight ticketing queries

From today, Qantas customers with partner airline bookings that haven’t been ticketed correctly can get in touch directly with an experienced team member by email.

The dedicated email address is [email protected] and this email inbox will be monitored daily from 8am until 5pm (Sydney/Melbourne time).

A Qantas spokesperson declined to say where the team monitoring this inbox is located, but assured us that they are a dedicated team of experienced agents who understand the complexities of reward seat ticketing.

Qantas encourages members to continue monitoring their bookings via Manage Booking on the Qantas website. If they’re concerned that their booking may have been impacted by a flight or schedule change, or it does not appear correctly, they should email the support line.

This support line will prioritise requests based on the date of departure (allowing for a faster response if travel is imminent), and will only respond to queries relating to partner airline reward flight ticketing. Unrelated complaints should still be directed to the regular Qantas contact channels.

Repeat callers to be triaged to more experienced call centre agents

One of the most frustrating aspects for customers impacted by Qantas’ ticketing failures in the past has been their experience when trying to get the issue resolved. Often, customers have spent many hours trying to call Qantas to get their flights reinstated, only to speak each time to an inexperienced agent at an offshore call centre who was unprepared or unequipped to help.

Qantas has an excellent team of experienced call centre agents in its Hobart and Auckland call centres, who are generally able to escalate and fix these kinds of issues.

Unfortunately, Qantas Frequent Flyer members who don’t have a high status tier are generally connected to one of Qantas’ outsourced call centres in either Cape Town, Suva or Manila. These staff are generally much less experienced and have been unable to reinstate lost flights. In some instances, these staff members have even made things worse by inadvertently cancelling a customer’s flight when they called about an unrelated query!

Qantas has hired more than 1,000 new contact centre employees in the past year, including a small number in Hobart. While it has taken time for these new staff to become fully trained and gain experience, Qantas says that customer service agent error rates have declined by 80% over the last six months.

While the airline says customer satisfaction with its contact centres is now increasing, it acknowledges that there are still isolated instances of agent error while new agents build up their experience in managing highly complex bookings and systems.

Therefore, Qantas will over the coming months roll out new technology that identifies customers who have had to call multiple times within a short space of time. These callers will be matched with more experienced agents.

Qantas already triages calls made by Platinum members to the superior Hobart call centre, where possible. But this is purely based on the member’s status tier, and doesn’t account for the complexity of their request.

It would be helpful if Qantas would also allow less experienced staff at its offshore call centres to transfer a call to the Australian contact centre if they believe the issue is too complex for them to effectively assist with. Currently, agents don’t seem to have this option and, at times, have instead given incorrect information or simply hung up on the customer.

Some bookings may still fall through the cracks

Unfortunately, Qantas acknowledges that some customers may still continue to lose their confirmed reward flights if the partner airline does not notify Qantas of a cancellation, and the customer does not proactively request for the ticket to be re-issued.

This could happen if a partner airline cancels a flight, but doesn’t file it in a way that triggers a notification to Qantas (and in turn, to the passenger.) In these instances, the flight simply disappears from the booking.

“Our next focus is the minority of cases where a partner airline cancels a flight in a way that doesn’t provide any notification for us to re-issue the ticket, which isn’t the usual process for a flight change,” Qantas told us.

Qantas is currently working with its partner airlines to try to prevent this situation and find a permanent solution.

“Protecting members’ reward seat bookings is extremely important to us, which is why we have invested significantly in this area.

“We are confident that we’re now in a much better position to manage these disruptions.”

What you should do if you have a Qantas Classic Flight Reward booking

If you have recently booked a Classic Flight Reward ticket using Qantas points, and you have not yet flown, we would encourage you to check your booking now via Manage Booking on the Qantas website. Check to make sure that all your flights are still there, and that everything appears as it should.

If you notice that some or all of the flights you booked are no longer showing, or something doesn’t look right, send an email to [email protected] immediately. In your email, be sure to include your booking reference (PNR) and the passenger’s name. (This inbox will be available from midday today.)

If you’re not sure whether your ticket has been issued yet, one way to do this is by entering your surname and Qantas booking reference into “Manage Booking” on the Royal Jordanian Airlines website. Your ticket number starting with “081” should be visible when viewing your booking there.

If you do not see any ticket number when viewing your booking on the Royal Jordanian website, it probably means your booking hasn’t been ticketed yet.

If there has recently been a schedule change on your booking that would require Qantas to re-issue (and not just revalidate) the ticket, but you still see the ticket number of your original booking on the Royal Jordanian website, you may also need to follow this up with Qantas.

When an airline re-issues a ticket, a new ticket number should be generated. Each passenger on the booking should have their own ticket number.

To ensure you’re notified if there is a change to your Qantas Classic Flight Reward booking, we would also recommend using a third-party booking management tool such as Check My Trip, TripIt or TripCase to monitor your booking. These services should notify you if there is a change to your booking. That way, you’ll have the chance to take action before potentially losing your flights.

Matt Graham

The editor of Australian Frequent Flyer, Matt's passion for travel has taken him to over 70 countries… with the help of frequent flyer points, of course!
Matt's favourite destinations (so far) are Germany, Brazil & Kazakhstan. His interests include economics, aviation & foreign languages, and he has a soft spot for good food and red wine.

You can connect with Matt by posting on the Australian Frequent Flyer community forum and tagging @AFF Editor.