I’ve been having to-and-fro conversations with Qantas’s social media team and other interested parties since I wrote this piece about my Frequent Flyer points.
Basically, my complaint was — and is — about phantom availability: reward seats that show up on the Qantas web page but have actually already been booked by somebody else.
I went through the extremely frustrating process of trying to book some of these seats time and time again, only to end up with an error message.
Here’s what I’ve been able to establish:
+ this is a “known problem” for Qantas, and mainly occurs when customers try to book seats on another airline — as I did. I wanted an Emirates business-class seat to London.
+ it happens because the Qantas site is not “live”. It makes a copy of the availability from its partner airlines, but then tries to book in real time.
+ they are working on it.
Qantas’s social media people have offered to help me with my booking — too late, because I’ve booked something else instead. Whether they would extend that offer to everybody who had the same problem, I very much doubt.
As I’ve pointed out to Qantas, this ghost availability is, to my mind, worse than having no availability, because it wastes the customer’s time. I spent many hours over several days trying to book seats that simply were not available.
It also exposes them to suggestions that they are involved in “bait” advertising by offering a product that does not exist.
Related story: Frequent frustration
