As Qantas faces up to tough questioning from a Senate committee and a claim from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) for as much as A$600 million for allegedly selling tickets on more than 8,000 “ghost flights” it had already cancelled, its customers might be thinking things are about to get better.
But there are reasons to think they won’t. At the heart of both the ACCC’s lawsuit, and the airline’s separate refusal to quickly refund hundreds of millions of dollars worth of credits for flights cancelled during COVID, lies the indifference to customers typical of a duopolistic market.
