Australian airline Qantas should pay a $66 million fine and $13 million in compensation to passengers affected by the ‘ghost flights’ scandal, Australia’s competition watchdog said on Monday.
The amount of the fine must still be validated by the courts. The company ‘admitted misleading consumers’ by advertising seats on tens of thousands of flights when they had been cancelled, according to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.
Qantas is expected to pay $13 million in compensation to 86,000 travelers affected by cancellations or botched rescheduling, according to this Source.
‘Qantas’ conduct was unacceptable,’ said commission chair Gina Cass-Gottlieb. ‘Many consumers will have made holiday, business and travel plans after booking a ghost flight that had been cancelled,’ she lamented.
Qantas admitted that in some cases customers had booked flights that had been canceled ‘two days or more’ previously. New Qantas chief executive Vanessa Hudson has admitted the airline ‘let customers down and failed to follow its own rules’.
“We know that many of our customers have been affected by our failure to provide timely cancellation notifications and we are sincerely sorry,” she said in a statement.
Long nicknamed ‘the spirit of Australia’, the 103-year-old national airline Qantas is on a mission to restore its image after facing a consumer backlash over the scandal, the surge in ticket prices and the layoff of 1,700 ground staff during the Covid-19 pandemic. The former CEO of the airline Qantas, Alan Joyce, announced his early retirement in September.
Qantas’ net profit fell 13.2% year-on-year to A$869 million (€526 million) in the second half of 2023, although the company said customer satisfaction had improved under the impetus from Vanessa Hudson.
/ATS
