Some of my Australian friends are big critics of our national airline, Qantas. I can honestly say that I’ve never had a problem with the Flying Kangaroo, either on the ground or in the air. Well, until a few days ago, I could say that.
It seemed like a simple thing to book a Frequent Flyer classic rewards flight from Dubai to London. I wanted a business class seat on May 6 (that’s today as I write this).
Sure enough, when I first searched, a few weeks ago, plenty of options came up, mostly Emirates flights through Qantas’s partner relationship.
For various reasons, I had to wait until this past Tuesday to make my booking. All was fine; I got online, put in my details and breezed through. A few options were available, I selected the seat I wanted. I was pretty excited about that because it would give me the chance to experience Emirates’ much-lauded A380 business class.
So Id clicked through to the details page, where I changed my contact numbers, which needed updating. I accepted the terms and conditions, and then, a splash screen came up as the computer processed my request.
And then, this error screen.
Over the next two days, I tried again and again, on different computers with different browsers. And always an error screen.
So I did what you do these days and vented on Twitter. After some to-and-fro with Qantas, I got this direct message:
So despite the fact that I DID find an available seat for May 6, Qantas says there weren’t any. The whole thing was a mirage, apparently.
I subsequently found another business class seat, on a different flight involving a transfer in Europe to British Airways (a One World partner of Qantas), for May 6 on the website — but, again, I couldn’t book it.
Sadly, I didn’t keep a screengrab record of those attempts, but I tried the Qantas website again today (which is May 6). The A380 option wasn’t available, so I chose a B777 flight. Once again, I went through the same procedure to get the same error screen.
I have screengrabs of the whole process, but here are the relevant ones:
So, it seems like there are a lot of ghost seats out there. Now, I’m willing to believe that perhaps, just maybe, somebody else grabbed the flight while I was going through the booking process. But for that to happen time and time again defies belief.
I can come to no other conclusion that that there is a glitch in the Qantas software the needs to be attended to. The only other, unthinkable, reason for this to happen would be that Qantas is indulging in some form of false advertising.
Since Qantas didn’t reply to my last two DMs, maybe somebody there will read this and explain how the glitch is being sorted out and when I might be able to use the website with confidence.
At the moment all I know is that I’ve got two weeks of holiday up my sleeve and I’m sitting in my lounge room rather than relaxing in the comfort of a business-class seat on EK3 to London.
PS: I found this interesting definition via Google:
Update, May 7: A person in the loyalty industry has contacted me to say that these “ghost entries” exist because several airlines are typically offering the same reward seats — in this case it would be Emirates, Qantas and Alaskan Airlines — and they cache the availability options because it would “cost a fortune” to update the information in real time. That may explain things a little, but it’s not really an excuse for the waste of time and disappointment involved.
