Qantas sued for allegedly selling seats on cancelled flights

Qantas Airways was sued by Australia’s competition watchdog for allegedly selling seats on thousands of cancelled flights, piling pressure on an airline already under lawmaker scrutiny for its treatment of customers and record profits. For more than 8,000 scrapped services between May and July 2022, Qantas kept selling tickets for an average of more than two weeks, and sometimes longer than a month, the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission said Thursday as it started Federal Court proceedings against the airline. Qantas also allegedly took weeks to tell ticketholders on more than 10,000 flights that their services had been cancelled. All told, Qantas pulled almost one quarter of domestic and international flights out of Australian airports between May and July of last year. In most cases, the airline continued to sell seats or didn’t tell ticketholders for days, and sometimes it did both, according to the ACCC. The forensic investigation suggests the airline benefited — at passengers’ expense — from large-scale cancellations that it failed to publicize. The claims strengthen the case to rein in an airline that controls about two-thirds of the Australian market, months before a government white paper is due to address competition in the sector. Qantas “engaged in false, misleading or deceptive conduct,” the ACCC said. The airline took payments for tickets on flights that it knew, or should have known, were already cancelled, it said. The competition regulator already draws more complaints about Qantas than any other business in Australia.<br/>