Qantas: booking check, check-in and the India hold exclusion

How to look up a booking on Qantas

1. 1Open Manage booking on qantas.com; the India version of the site is under /en-in/.
2. 2Enter the Qantas six-character booking reference.
3. 3Add the last name exactly as it appears on the booking.
4. 4If a travel agency or third-party website booked it, changes go through that company; Qantas sends you back to them.
5. 5For a flight operated by a oneworld or codeshare partner, check in with the operating carrier, which sets its own times.

Book Now, Pay Later and the India exclusion

Qantas offers Book Now, Pay Later only “if your flight departs from Australia, Canada, France, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, the United Kingdom or the United States”. How long you get to pay depends on the fare conditions and the time to departure; the due date appears at payment, and an unpaid booking is cancelled at 11:59 pm on that date. The price can change while the booking is on hold.

The holding charge per passenger is A$25, C$25, €20, ¥2,000, NZ$50, S$25, £15 or US$25 depending on where you depart, and it is refunded after full payment online. You lose it if you pay at a Qantas office or airport, cancel, or miss the deadline. It is not available for Qantas Points bookings, round-the-world trips, combined Qantas and Jetstar bookings or some special fares.

India is not on the list, so a Delhi–Melbourne return cannot be held this way. An Indian living in Singapore or the UK, starting a trip from there, can use it. For everyone applying from India, a flight reservation on a Qantas routing is the way to show planned flights in an Australian or New Zealand visa file.

Checking in for Qantas at Delhi

Qantas opens online and app check-in 24 hours ahead and shuts it 90 minutes before an international departure. Airport check-in usually opens three hours ahead, but Delhi is one of six airports, with Dallas/Fort Worth, Heathrow, JFK, San Francisco and Vancouver, where it opens four hours before. The latest check-in and bag drop for Qantas-operated international flights (QF1 to QF399) is 60 minutes before departure.

Have your passport ready for online check-in on an international flight, and if no boarding pass is issued, see an agent at the airport. Flights operated by oneworld, codeshare or other partners are checked in with the operating carrier, which sets its own times.

Australia and New Zealand visas on a Qantas itinerary

Qantas is mostly a destination airline for Indians: Australia is where the trip ends, not a hub to pass through. Whether Indians can transit Sydney or Melbourne without a visa, and on what terms, could not be confirmed on Home Affairs pages, so do not plan a connection there without checking. Moving from an international to a domestic terminal means entering Australia, which needs the visitor visa (subclass 600) in any case.

Continuing to New Zealand needs a separate New Zealand visa; an Australian visa does not cover it. If your plan covers both countries, show one itinerary that includes the Tasman crossing, with dates that match both applications and the hotel bookings in each.

Once you do buy, Qantas has a 24-hour change policy for bookings made on qantas.com or the app: within 24 hours it waives change fees for corrections to the flight date or time, origin or destination, fare type, class and name spelling on Qantas-operated flights. Any fare difference still applies, and it is a fee waiver, not a refund.

Qantas in India: what is confirmed and what is not

Qantas does not publish an India route list we could read. A Delhi service from Melbourne is reported by secondary sources, and Qantas’s own check-in page has a Delhi airport rule, which points to an operation there. Sydney–Bengaluru, first launched in September 2022, is listed by one secondary source as resuming on 25 October 2026, but Qantas has not confirmed it, and Bengaluru is missing from the check-in page’s airport list.

Mumbai and Kolkata are past Qantas destinations, and IndiGo is reported as a codeshare partner as of June 2025. Before building an itinerary around a Qantas non-stop from India, check the current schedule on qantas.com; if it is not bookable there, plan a connection through a hub such as Singapore, Kuala Lumpur or Hong Kong instead.

Qantas questions, answered