Throughout the pandemic, many Qantas customers have complained about having to wait many weeks or months to receive a refund from Qantas for cancelled flights. Others have found it too difficult to request a refund.
The good news is that Qantas recently made changes to its refund processes to make it easier and faster for customers to get their money back. Most refunds are now being processed in under a week – as was already the case with most other airlines.
Qantas disabled automatic refunds during the pandemic
At the start of the pandemic, inundated with refund requests as flights were grounded, numerous airlines including Qantas made the deliberate decision to disable automatic refund processing. This meant that refunds needed to be manually processed, which takes a lot longer. (That was exactly the point.)
Qantas also removed the ability to request a refund on most types of bookings from its website. During the pandemic, customers could generally still cancel a Classic Reward booking for a refund online. But customers would only be able to request a flight credit online when cancelling a paid airfare – even on a flexible, refundable booking. In addition, if Qantas itself cancelled a flight, customers would automatically be given a flight credit – not a refund – by default.
Even though they were legally entitled to a full refund in this situation, Qantas customers would need to call the airline to request their money back – often waiting hours on hold to do so.
After submitting a refund request, Qantas’ modus operandi during the pandemic was to then take many weeks or months to process this. Many customers waited more than three months.
If you’d already been waiting more than 8 weeks for your money to be returned, Qantas would manually process your refund on the spot if you called them. But Qantas’ policy was that its call centre staff were only allowed to do this for customers who had already been waiting at least eight weeks since requesting the refund. They could not help anyone who’d been waiting less than this.
Qantas also had a cruel habit during the pandemic of “zeroing out” flights it intended to cancel, rather than immediately cancelling them, in order to hold onto customers’ money even longer.
There’s no real reason that Qantas customers should have had to wait months for a refund when other airlines, including Virgin Australia and Rex, were able to refund money within just a few days. This appears to have been a deliberate decision by Qantas management to improve the airline’s cash flow. (Never mind the cash flow of the airline’s own customers, who were unable to access their own money which they were legally entitled to for months.)
Qantas has reinstated automatic refunds
The good news is that the waiting times for Qantas refunds have now been substantially reduced.
In April, Qantas reinstated the automatic processing of refunds for “simple” bookings. Around 80% of bookings fall under this category, according to the airline, and are now being processed within one week.
More complex bookings may still require manual processing, but this should also now take less time as fewer bookings need to be processed in this way going forward.
If Qantas has cancelled your flight, or you have made a refundable booking, you may also now be able to request a refund through the “manage booking” portal on the Qantas website or app, rather than having to call.
AFF member experiences
Numerous Australian Frequent Flyer members have reported receiving faster refunds over the past month. Here are a few posts from the forum…
Cancelled a classic rewards on Saturday online and the points were in my account 2 hours later….Sunday received an email saying the taxes had been returned to my credit card and hit my account on Tuesday….Now thats a huge improvement !!!
– pyffii, 9 June 2022
I just received my refund, $4.5K from QF within 48 hours. Well done on this occasion.
– BAM1748, 17 June 2022
Cancelled an international reward ticket on 12/06
Points refunded on 18/08
Fees/cash refunded on 18/06
– Ade, 20 June 2022
Cancelled 2 international reward tickets on May 31 over the phone. Points returned while I was on the phone to the agent so I could rebook immediately for next year. Taxes refunded on June 6 to Amex CC
– Maybloomer, 20 June 2022
I cancelled my booking on Qantas app around 10pm on 6th Jun, next morning I could see all points refunded back to my account. Also received email about the tax refund, and then received back my payment in my credit card 2-3 days later. Big improvement from Qantas !
Oh, but it was still hard to get through the phone. I tried to call them a few times before that but gave up after waiting for nearly 45 mins and still in queue (I tried to change my return flight but couldn’t do online, so needed their help). Finally decided to cancel the whole booking and re-do it. And the cancellation was quickly proceeded as above.
– MsCanDo, 11 June 2022
Unfortunately, it’s still not entirely smooth sailing. Another AFF member recently cancelled a booking for two passengers, but only received a refund for one passenger.
They called Qantas and got through to an operator at the Cape Town call centre who told them they would have to wait another 6-8 weeks for the refund for the second passenger and that this was their own fault for cancelling the tickets separately. (This is not something that is even possible to do online – it’s a Qantas IT bug that has already been widely reported by other people.)
Here’s a trick – booked and next day cancelled 2 J tkts for Mrs and me. Did the cancellation online (since we were 40k ft up with EK). No probs, one refund comes thru in full to my debit card in 3 days, but no sign of the second refund until I phone 2 weeks later.
Eventually get thru to the Safr call centre to be told second tkt will take 6-8 weeks because I didn’t cancel both at the same time. How could I, I asked, there’s no provision on QF ‘manage my booking’ other that to just ‘cancel’. Same booking ref for both, so you’d think cancel one means cancel all. Not the case…
– BCons, 13 June 2022
If you’re still waiting for a refund that you requested more than 8 weeks ago, you can still get it expedited by calling Qantas. But it’s not yet clear whether there has been any change to Qantas’ policy of not expediting requests for refunds made less than 8 weeks ago.
Either way, the new Qantas refund system does seem to be an improvement for most people. Welcome back to the 21st century, Qantas.
Join the discussion on the Australian Frequent Flyer forum: How long did Qantas take to process your refund for cancelled flights?
