By Stuart Condie
Qantas Airways faces legal action by Australia’s competition regulator over allegations that the carrier sold thousands of tickets for flights it knew had been cancelled.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission on Thursday said it had launched legal proceedings in the country’s Federal Court over Qantas’s behavior relating to more than 10,000 cancelled flights between May and July 2022.
The ACCC alleges that the company kept selling tickets for more than 8,000 flights for an average of more than two weeks after cancellation. In some cases the delay was 47 days, the ACCC alleges.
The carrier failed to notify ticketholders for more than 10,000 flights of cancellations for an average of 18 days, or as long as 48 days.
“We allege that Qantas’s conduct in continuing to sell tickets to cancelled flights, and not updating ticketholders about cancelled flights, left customers with less time to make alternative arrangements and may have led to them paying higher prices to fly at a particular time not knowing that flight had already been cancelled,” ACCC Chair Gina Cass-Cass-Gottlieb said.
Qantas did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Qantas last week launched a fresh share buyback of 500 million Australian dollars (US$324 million) after swinging back to annual profit for the first time since fiscal 2019.
Australia’s national carrier reported a net profit for the 12 months through June of A$1.75 billion, compared with an A$860 million loss a year earlier.
Write to Stuart Condie at [email protected]
Corrections & Amplifications
This article was corrected at 0106 GMT to reflect that Gina Cass-Gottlieb is the chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. The original article incorrectly spelled her last name as Cass-Gottileb.
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