On Thursday afternoon, lots of Qantas customers received strange emails about “important changes” to their flight “QF9097 to QZY”. This caused a lot of confusion since, well, this flight doesn’t actually exist.
So, what is this all about?
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What exactly is QF9097 from QZW to QZY?
For many years, Qantas has used the flight number QF9097 as a placeholder known as a “pseudo flight”. In Qantas’ systems, this appears as a flight between two airports both known as “Fictitious Point”, which have the IATA airport codes QZW and QZY respectively.
Until recently, this was a daily flight in Qantas’ backend systems that would depart and 9am, arrive at midday, and be operated by a Boeing 747SR – a historic plane that Qantas does not actually fly.
You might see this flight on your ticket if you have an unredeemed gift voucher or flight credit. It exists because Qantas has to have something on every ticket to keep it active in the system. But if you have a gift voucher that you haven’t redeemed, or a flight credit for a cancelled booking and haven’t yet used it to book a new flight, there won’t be any real flights on the ticket. Hence the addition of a pseudo flight.
The fictitious QF9097 therefore exists as a placeholder, with the date of the flight usually representing the expiry date of the credit or voucher. Once you redeem the credit to book a new flight, the fictitious flight should disappear from the booking.
Qantas has also used QF9331 as a “pseudo flight” to keep residual funds from COVID-era flight credits in its system. For bookings made in Australia, this appears as a flight from Sydney (SYD) to “ZZF”, an airport code normally used for mystery flights.
So, what were this week’s emails about?
If you have an outstanding Qantas flight credit or voucher that you haven’t yet redeemed, you probably received the following email on Thursday afternoon:
Qantas sent a second email on Friday afternoon, apologising that a “technical issue” caused that email to be sent in error.
It seems what happened is that Qantas updated the schedule of its fictitious flight QF9097 in its reservations system. It’s now a nine-minute flight arriving at Fictitious Point (QZY) at 11.59pm. I assume this new “arrival” time better reflects the actual intended expiration time for flight credits?
As Qantas’ system treats this like any other flight, this triggered the same email to automatically send that would be sent if a real flight had a schedule change.
Don’t worry: If you received these emails, you don’t need to do anything. However, Qantas is advising that it may not be possible to redeem some gift cards or credits online for the foreseeable future. If you can’t use your credit online, you can call Qantas to do so.
For what it’s worth, I had to call Qantas the last time I wanted to redeem a gift voucher anyway, as the website didn’t actually let me complete the booking for some reason. That was several months ago.
Virgin Australia’s pseudo flight
Virgin Australia also has a specific flight number that it uses as a fake “pseudo flight” for the purpose of keeping tickets with residual credit active. In this case, it’s VA5996 from Headquarters (HDQ – not a real airport code) to Birdsville (BVI – a real IATA code for the outback Queensland town’s airfield).
