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I just had a bizarre experience booking a fairly ordinary return flight with Qantas. I booked directly on their official website, punched in my credit card, got a success page and soon thereafter a "Confirmation and E-Ticket Flight Itinerary" email containing my flights with "Status: Confirmed" and a "Payment Details" section correctly listing my credit card.

All good -- or so I thought. 15 minutes later, I get a second email entitled "We are holding flights from X to Y for you until 11.59pm tonight", stating "We noticed that you didn't get a chance to finish your reservation so we're holding your flights until 11.59pm tonight", with a link to "Confirm your booking" that took me to a payment page.

I checked my credit card online, the payment was there, albeit listed as "Pending". I called Qantas and asked WTF, they told me that the payment had not "arrived" on their side and if I don't make payment before midnight, my flights would be cancelled.

Lacking better options, I paid again while still online, using exactly the same card, and this time the customer service rep said the payment came through and everything was sorted. A few minutes later, I received another PDF by email, which to my untrained eye looks 100% identical to my previous "confirmation".

Checking my bank app again, I now have two identical "Pending" payments. I called my bank, they said both payments had already gone through but they would raise a dispute to cancel out the first one.

I have many questions, but let's start with these:

  • When is a confirmation not actually a confirmation?
  • How can I tell apart a confirmed-but-actually-haha-not-confirmed from an actually-confirmed booking?
lambshaanxy
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2 Answers2

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On most airlines it's a two step process. When you press a "submit" button, the booking is created and the booking reference is issued. This just means you have created a request with "I want to buy this ticket with these conditions and this price". This triggers the airline to issue a ticket an actual ticket where they also process the payment.

If you book with the airline, both things often (but not always) happen simultaneously. It can take longer when book with a 3rd party.

United used to send two e-mails. A booking confirmation and an "ticket has been issued" confirmation, which came within a minute or so of each. It appears that most airlines have consolidated this into a single e-mail that gets created when the booking has been received.

Occasionally things go wrong between the booking request and the ticket being issued. That's typically called by some technical problem and since it's not supposed to happen, they don't deal with it well and the booking gets stuck in limbo.

How can I tell apart a confirmed-but-actually-haha-not-confirmed from an actually-confirmed booking?

I think you best shot is to log into the website and see if the booking is there and fully manageable. Having an actual ticket number is a good sign as well, although sometimes these are not easy to find.

Hilmar
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(Not sure if this is an answer or just a long comment)

Obviously, Qantas only considers a confirmation to be a confirmation when they have received your payment. But they also seemed to trust your CC company to send them the money that was owed (which is not unreasonable in most cases), but that money never arrived due to sort of "glitch" on your bank's side (and is something that you have no control over).

Given that Qantas is not your CC company there always exists the chance that such a glitch could happen (or the payment is not instantaneous), but I have a (possibly naive) viewpoint that the system is designed, by people much more knowledgeable than me, to deal with such glitches.

But I think it comes down to that a confirmation is only a confirmation when all three parties agree that all steps have been processed when making a booking:

  • You have done everything that should have been done.
  • The airline has confirmed that you have made the booking.
  • The bank confirms that the payment has been made.

So all you can do is to check both your airline and bank and see if they both agree, and if not start asking questions (which you did).

BTW it's also possible that if you waited long enough that your bank could have caught up with paying Qantas before midnight. And I think that what you experienced was an extremely rare event - I personally would also be shocked if an electronic payment didn't go through when I ordered something online from a major retailer.

Peter M
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