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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?
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    This seems like a question about credit card payment more than travel, and so Money SE might be better. It sounds as if there's some failure of the credit card transaction. Businesses will decide a purchase is paid for at some point based on information received from the payment company, and whether it's a ticket or a new phone doesn't really matter. (There are travel-related issues around ticket confirmations e.g. firms requiring you to confirm a flight booking before traveling, but this question isn't about that, so it could be confusing.)
    – Stuart F
    Commented Nov 5 at 14:26
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    I would not have raised a dispute until both of them show as cleared. Sometimes one won't clear, despite what customer service thinks. Sometimes the merchant's systems are smart enough to realize they cleared twice and reverse one. By disputing, you run the risk that both end up not cleared and making a bigger mess.
    – user71659
    Commented Nov 5 at 22:25
  • Related: travel.stackexchange.com/a/191914/30703
    – jcaron
    Commented Nov 6 at 15:36
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    @user71659 Yes, there's indeed a risk that they at some point receive a notification that a payment associated with that booking as been disputed, and cancel/block the ticket, even though there is another perfectly good payment. I would monitor the status of the ticket closely.
    – jcaron
    Commented Nov 6 at 15:40

2 Answers 2

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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.

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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.

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  • I think this is more speculation than answer. How it works in ideal designs is that you put a charge on the card, which confirms that the amount is available, blocks that amount, and lets you capture it. This is the step where you put in your 2fa code and all. You then do the local work of marking the payment as received, then you capture it. If you have an error during this phase, you can cancel the charge or if you don't, the bank will drop it after a while automatically (often 7 days). The bank implied to OP that both were captured, meaning bad design on Qantas' end.
    – ave
    Commented Nov 5 at 14:34
  • @ave Yes it is mainly speculation, but I believe it is reasonable speculation. The OPs issue is due to a (highly unlikely) failed interaction between two major closed systems. As consumers we can't say where the missed step occurred. It could have been on Qantas' end or it could have been on the CC end. Nor can we do anything about the internals of the issue. And unless you are an IT specialist who works with both Qantas and the CC company, your comment is also chock full of conjecture as to how you believe the overall system will operate.
    – Peter M
    Commented Nov 5 at 15:41
  • This is how online card payments operate in general. And I guess I'm an IT Specialist that got this wrong when implementing a payment gateway in the past, in the same way that Qantas might have, and have fixed it by learning how it's supposed to be (which I described in my comment). And yeah it's full of conjecture, simplified it is "when you order smth card is validated and amount is blocked, but payment isn't fully done until the merchant says they've processed things on their end. if they don't do that, bank will drop the block in a week. the merchant should implement this properly.".
    – ave
    Commented Nov 5 at 16:11

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