O&D Availability and Married Flights
What is O&D Availability?
Availability is based on point of sale and your customer's origin and destination (O&D). When selling itineraries that include Qantas flights, ensure you request availability and book flights in accordance with your customer's intended O&D.
What are Married Flights?
Married flights occur when you have booked two or more flights from origin to destination and the flights lock together and become ‘married’.
Connecting flights lock together and become married:
- At the time of booking;
- After the sale of multiple connecting flights;
- After a change is made to an existing booking creating a new connection.
General Information
Our Qantas Revenue Management System provides availability based on your customer’s journey between origin and destination or simply where a customer begins and ends their journey. For this reason, you should display availability and book your customer's flights based on their origin and destination.
Amadeus
A ‘MSC’ header tag appears in the PNR to indicate that married flights exist.
Use the Edifact GDS entry RTIM to display which flights are married.
Travelport Galileo
Married flights are identified by numbers at the end of each segment. The first set of married flights will show ‘1’, the second will show ‘2’ etc.
There is no Edifact GDS entry to verify married flights.
Sabre
Married flights are identified by an asterisk (*) after each city pair.
Use the Edifact GDS entry *IMSL to verify which flights are married.
Flights are married based on two factors:
Flight
The following flights in all cabins and classes will be married:
- Qantas flights with ‘QF’ flight number operated by Qantas
- All Qantas (QF) and Emirates (EK) flights, including codeshares
- Qantas codeshare flights with ‘QF’ flight number operated by:
◦ LATAM
◦ Asiana
◦ China Eastern
◦ China Airlines
◦ China Southern
◦ Aircalin
◦ Air Niugini
◦ Solomon Airlines
Important! Other codeshare services and interline connections to Qantas flights will not be married.
Flight Connection Time
Eligible flights will be married when connections fall within the following times:
- Domestic connections up to 6 hours;
- International to International connections within 24 hours;
- Domestic to International connections within 24 hours or vice versa;
- Connections in Dubai within 72 hours.
- Connections in Singapore within 72 hours.
An Agent Debit Memo (ADM) will be issued for misuse of Qantas availability. The ADM will recover the fare difference between the booked class and the lowest available class on the booked origin and destination at the time of booking creation. Refer to Agent Debit Memos for further information.
Your Customer's Booking
Once booked, married flights cannot always be changed independently of each other.
- If you need to change or cancel one of the married flights, you may have to cancel both flights and rebook from current availability.
- If a required connecting flight is not available, rebook both flights between the origin and destination as this will give you the best chance of confirming the waitlisted flight.
When you retrieve a PNR you will see differences between general availability and PNR availability.
To make changes to bookings containing married flights we recommend you:
- Retrieve the PNR
- Display availability between origin and destination
- Rebook from the available inventory
Avoid holding flights for quoting purposes in an existing PNR. New flights added to a booking will be married and cannot be ‘divorced’ if your customer decides not to go ahead with the changes.
Refer to the International Ticket Reissue Policy and the Domestic Ticket Reissue Policy for how to re-assess fares after changes are made.
Following a schedule change, the status of a flight changes to UN/TK. This will ‘divorce’ the married flights. Do not accept the schedule change if you need to make changes to a connecting flight in accordance with schedule change guidelines. Once rebooked, the flights will marry again.
Married Flights cannot be ticketed separately. If separate tickets are required, the flights should be booked and ticketed in separate PNRs.
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