Qantas: Man makes 30 calls to airline and is charged $718 after booking bungle

A fed up passenger who had to make 30 phone calls to resolve a booking blunder says he will never fly with Qantas again after the airline subsequently gave him a $718 mystery charge.

Robert Manning, 55, spent more than nine hours on the phone with the airline after attempting to book a return flight from Sydney to Adelaide on August 28 for his wife and son with remaining credit from a cancellation.

The simple housekeeping part quickly turned into a two-week nightmare when the booking system refused to accept the retired telecommunications manager’s purchase.

Qantas wouldn’t give him credit for his son’s ticket because he claimed he took the flight that never left.

“They said the system let your son fly,” Mr Manning told the Daily Mail Australia.

“I said he didn’t fly anywhere unless he’s Superman.”

“I just wanted what I’d already paid for.

“I was willing to pay a little bit of difference because fuel prices had gone up.

But five days and several phone calls later, the problem was still unresolved.

It was shuffled back and forth from Qantas customer service agents to the airline’s Facebook Messenger system until finally the cost difference was supposedly resolved on Sept. 2.

But shortly after, he saw two unexplained charges on his bank statement of $115.44 and $603.38, which amounted to $718.82.

“With a debit card you shouldn’t be able to charge because it’s not an arbitrary credit limit — it’s real money,” he said.

My wife went shopping and they said ‘your card has been declined’.

“So she had to go to our savings account and return the money.

“What gives Qantas the right to do that?

“What if we lived from week to week and we had to run errands or pay the kid’s doctor’s bill or whatever, and were accidentally held there.

“Theoretically it should have been blocked.”

Mr Manning thinks that because it was a big company like Qantas, his bank ANZ just accepted the charges.

It took a week of further phone calls to both the airline and the bank to get the money back.

During the long hours he spent on the phone with Qantas representatives, Mr. Manning said he became frustrated but managed not to lose his cool.

Something that helped put the frustrating ordeal into perspective was his recent battle with liver failure late last year, which left him in a coma.

“A woman at a Qantas center said, ‘I can’t stay here forever,’ and I said, ‘I can’t and you can’t hang up until I decide the conversation is over,'” Mr. Manning said.

‘She said ‘do you think you have the patience?’ and I said, ‘I’ve been in a coma for two weeks, this is a walk in the park’.

Mr Manning has flown hundreds of flights and estimates that he has spent millions for himself and his staff at the iconic Australian airline.

However, Silver Member for Life says he will “never fly with the airline again” and has already canceled a $3,500 ticket to the US on October 15.

He says the airline has grown so big that they’ve “lost the ghost” of what they once were.

A Qantas spokesperson told news.com.au that the airline has since reached out and apologized to Mr Manning.

“This was a mistake made by an operator during a complex booking process and we are looking into what went wrong and how we can make sure it doesn’t happen again,” they said.

“The charge was only an authorization, not a payment, and we contacted Robert’s bank to have the money returned to his account as soon as possible. The money has since been refunded.’

But Mr. Manning denies that Qantas ever apologized to him over the phone, as they claimed both on news.com.au and in an email.