A woman has recently shared her three-month struggle with Qantas Airlines to get compensation, as the company wrongly charged her approximately forty thousand dollars.
Further Details
In March 2022, Carol Johnson planned to go on holiday with her husband and son to the United States. Choosing Qantas as her carrier, she booked five flights with the airline, totalling $16,357.35.
However, she discovered she had been heavily overcharged a few days after her purchase. When she went out for a coffee, her card declined, causing her to contact her bank. In doing so, Ms Johnson discovered that her bank account had multiple direct debits to Qantas Airlines, added without her permission, totalling forty thousand dollars.
Although it was clear that Carol Johnson had been overcharged, she stressed that contacting and communicating with the airline’s customer services was a time-consuming experience that she labelled as “slow torture”.
She shared,
“I was on the phone for days. I was getting up at three or four o’clock in the morning to be put on hold for four to five hours.”
The situation continued for five days, with Ms Johnson repeatedly calling Qantas customer service for assistance, and her bank account was frozen. Due to this unfortunate incident, Ms Johnson’s holiday was cancelled entirely.
Sadly, this was not the end of Carol Johnson’s nightmare with the airline. A month later, she purchased two business plane flights to Honolulu, Hawaii, on July 26th, which cost her over $13,000 in an attempt to rebook her first holiday, which was cancelled.
Yet, after a week, the frustrated customer received an email from Qantas Airlines claiming they were having difficulty processing her transaction. After this ordeal, Ms Johnson used her husband’s card to pay via phone, and it seemed that this was successful, though, similarly to the incident in March, she had three pending $13,431.48 payments on both her and her husband’s cards.
This issue was resolved almost a month later, on August 19th, but once again, Qantas Airlines had double charged Carol Johnson as the initial payment for the flights was taken from her account on September 8th. She was not given her money back for 12 days after continued communication with the airline’s customer services.
Qantas’s Apology
The airline has since apologised to Carol Johnson and publicly addressed the issue.
‘She should not have been charged twice in August and September, and we returned the funds to her as soon as we became aware,’ the airline said.
