A court report issued yesterday recorded details of how Australia’s national airline, Qantas, advertised and sold tickets for over 8,000 flights that had already been scheduled to be cancelled. The false advertising and deceptive conduct allegedly took place between May 2022 and July 2022.
Qantas Airline faces lawsuit over fraudulent flights
The crux is that these flight cancellations were typically due to circumstances that fell within the airline’s control, including re-routing, availability of landing and take-off runways in airports, and consumer demand.
In the court filing, the watchdog Australian Competition and Consumer Commission suggested that tickets remained available on various airline comparison sites and Qantas’ website for an average of more than two weeks, with some tickets registering over 47 days after the flights had been cancelled. The sum of the cancelled tickets sits somewhere around the $200m mark.
The burgeoning lawsuit follows the $10m in shares that the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors awarded the company on Friday under a pandemic-era retention scheme, helping with long-term bonuses from 2020, 2021 and 2022, which CEO Alan Joyce had previously deferred.
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Last week, the airline posted statutory total losses of $6.3bn over the three years from 2020-2022.
Labor National President Wayne Swan, stated:
We have price gouging and deceptive conduct and real questions to be answered by Qantas, and in particular the Qantas board, which has appeared to be arrogant and very much in breach of the law.
Swan also suggested that the Qantas board balanced yearly bonuses over consumer satisfaction, appearing as arrogant officials who are very much in breach of the law.
Talks are now underway as to whether Qatar Airlines can replace Qantas as the largest airline operating in Australia.
