Qantas's public relations team is red-faced after a twitter publicity campaign backfired.
The campaign came a day after unions and the airlines announced their deadlocked talks would go to forced arbitration, following the grounding of the fleet in late October by CEO Alan Joyce.
Qantas invited people to tweet and "tell us what is your dream luxury inflight experience?( Be creative!) Answer must include #QantasLuxury."
The prize for the top tweet was a gift pack including a pair of Qantas first class pyjamas and a "luxury amenity kit".
But the QantasLuxury hashtag, which was the top trending topic in Australia about 3pm (AEDT) was quickly hijacked by people having a joke at the airline's expense.
"What's odder, the idiotic timing or the imbecilic prize?" asked one tweeter.
"Alan Joyce now seeking an injunction to ground twitter due to QantasLuxury fiasco", tweeted another.
Other tweets, such as "did it, hated, never again" and "qantasluxury is still calling Australia 51 per cent home" and "Qantasluxury is what we used to get before crooks like Alan Joyce started running our national airline" summed up the general attitude of tweeters.
"We run a number of competitions and this one has certainly not garnered the response that we were expecting," a Qantas spokeswoman told AAP.
A number of people had legitimately entered the competition, she added.
