Qantas planes (Image: AP/Mark Baker)
(Image: AP/Mark Baker)

Rather than a dry-as-dust legal document in response to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s charges of knowingly selling tickets to cancelled “ghost flights”, Qantas has surprised us all with a spirited, breezy “Five Fun Facts You Didn’t Know”-style defence in the Federal Court backed up with a fun FAQ.

Here’s a quick guide to this amazing trivia we bet you didn’t know when you bought a ticket for your Qantas flight.

Fun fact 1: You did not buy a ticket for your flight!

You may think you bought a ticket for a flight. You may have received from Qantas a ticket for a flight. But the “service” that Qantas supplies is not carriage on any “particular flight” but rather a bundle of rights. Yes, hope you sought legal advice before clicking “buy” on the Qantas site, and don’t leave your lawyer at home when you travel, because what you actually purchased was a vague set of contractual obligations that are pretty much unrelated to what you think you bought.

“While Qantas will do its best to get consumers where they want to be on time, it does not guarantee particular flight times or its flight schedules.” In fact, we don’t even promise to make “reasonable endeavours to operate any particular flight”.

Fun fact 2: We won’t upset you by telling you we cancelled your flight!

So that flight you thought you bought a ticket on? Turns out we cancelled it. Yeah, we cancelled it even before we sold you your nebulous bundle of contractual obligations. But we didn’t tell you because we didn’t want to upset you! If we’d told people their flights nebulous bundle of contractual obligations had been cancelled, “we believe this would have resulted in a significantly more frustrating customer experience. If we had sent texts to thousands of customers a week saying their flight had been cancelled and we would get back to them on their alternative flight options, we would have created a lot of needless uncertainty for those customers.”

We know what’s best for you and your travel plans, thanks — not that you can legally rely on us for your travel plans.

Fun fact 3: That ‘Manage Booking’ thing is a kind of in-joke, not a useful tool for you

Heh heh. So, you know those “close doors” buttons in elevators that don’t work? Or the pedestrian crossing buttons that don’t do anything? That’s kinda what our “Manage Booking” feature is.

“Qantas did not represent to consumers that the ‘Manage Booking’ page would, at all times, necessarily reflect the latest scheduling decisions that Qantas had made.”

So when we cancel your flight nebulous bundle of contractual obligations, we left it on our website so you could have fun pretending to manage details like booking a seat or ordering a meal. None of it had an actual result, but we like to think it made you feel better while you did it. Yet again, we’re thinking of you!

Fun fact 4: Our IT systems are shit, but luckily we can still take your money!

Turns out we were so rubbish that we overloaded our own systems… Oops! Yes, we were cancelling so many flights nebulous bundles of contractual obligations that “system limitations” meant we couldn’t actually take flights off our site. Nothing to do with earning interest on your money while we held it for the days, weeks and months before handing it back to you, or so we could hoard airports slots to prevent competitors from offering their flights. No, we were just so bad our IT system couldn’t hack it.

Fortunately, however, our IT system was still working sufficiently well to take your money when you booked that “flight” you thought you were booking. So don’t worry, the important part of the system was working just fine.

Fun fact 5: Our awful workers are to blame, yet again

Qantas is the real victim here. As happened so often when the corporate genius of the age, Alan Joyce, was in charge, Qantas was hit hard by bad luck, bad customers and bad workers. It wasn’t our fault that we illegally sacked 1,700 workers — that was a sound commercial decision. It wasn’t our fault that there were huge delays when we restarted services after the pandemic — customers weren’t “match fit”! It wasn’t our fault that we routinely cancelled nebulous bundles of obligations and sprayed your luggage all across the country. And it wasn’t our fault that we left all those cancelled “flights” on sale.

“Some of the longer delays were due to human error and process failures.” Yep, our bloody workers! Sigh. But rest assured we’re closely examining sacking them and outsourcing their jobs.

So you may think we have been caught red-handed flogging ghost flights, full well knowing they were never going to fly, misleading customers and ruining the travel plans of thousands of people who relied on us. But that’s on you if you were silly enough to think you were actually booking a flight, or that we were even promising to do our best to operate that flight. And if you’re dumb enough to think you know better than us about when we should tell you we’ve ruined your holiday, more fool you. Don’t like it? Fuck you and fly with someone else.

Has Qantas blown its last chance for you? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.