Leading Australian Airlines Do Not Offer Gender-Neutral Options When Booking Flights

Leading Australian Airlines, including Qantas, Rex, and Virgin Australia, do not offer gender-neutral options when booking flights, and require passengers to choose a binary gender option. 

Star Observer reached out to these airlines as both Qantas and Virgin Australia offered Pride Flights during Sydney WorldPride 2023.

Qantas has been a participant in the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Parade for several years.

According to Virgin’s website, the Pride Flights are flights that feature special guests, and live performances, “staffed entirely by LGBT+ pilots and cabin crew, the flight will be a true celebration of queer culture.”

When booking a flight, Qantas, Rex, and Virgin Australia require a title to be chosen, yet they do not offer gender-neutral options to choose from. 

Virgin Australia goes a step further and requires a gender to be chosen, however, male and female are the only options available. 

A spokesperson for Virgin Australia said, “Virgin Australia is, and always has been, a champion of diversity and inclusion, particularly in the LGBTQIA+ community.

“We recognise that some members of the community who identify as non-binary or transgender do not wish to have a gender displayed as part of their travel journey with Virgin Australia, and we are in active discussions with our customer systems providers on how we may be able to establish this functionality in the future.”

According to the spokesperson, in 2021, Virgin Australia created a working group tasked with looking into the process for launching non-binary customer-facing systems, which would also remove the requirement to list a gender when making a booking on their website.

They continued, “We are continuing to work through the process for launching non-binary customer-facing systems. This process is incredibly complex and it takes considerable time to implement a change like this. We do not yet have a date in place for the launch of non-binary customer-facing systems and we will keep you updated as we progress. “

The spokesperson went on to claim that, “All Australian airlines currently have the same requirement of customers to nominate a gender when making a booking. Gender has long been a requirement of airline reservations systems globally.”

A quick search, however, revealed that while both Qantas and Rex do require a title be chosen, they do not require a gender to be nominated. 

Foreign airlines United Airlines and New Zealand Air, who both require a title to be chosen, include the gender-neutral ‘Mx” as an option. 

United Airlines, Virgin Australia’s US partner airline, also requires a gender be chosen. However, they include four options to choose from: Unspecified, Undisclosed, Male, and Female. 

Qantas and Rex did not respond at press time and we will update the story when we receive their responses. 

According to the Australian Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts, the Department, “does not administer regulations which require airlines to ask for personal information relating to a passenger’s gender or title.”

They went on to say, “It’s ultimately a matter for airlines to advise the purposes – regulatory or otherwise – of the customer information they collect.”