Photo courtesy of Bernal Saborio via flickr.
A computer glitch on the United Airlines’ website Wednesday morning allowed travelers to book first class seats…for 491 Danish kroner (about $75 USD) round trip. The airline sold several thousand tickets at this price, which usually go for around $6,000. Travelers simply had to change their host country to Denmark to find the cheap fare between London and New York.
Airline fare glitches typically occur due to the fact that, while prices are calculated using complicated software, there is still a human inputting certain data. Delighted fliers were all too happy to take advantage of the glitch, but soon after United released the following statement to USA TODAY:
“United is voiding the bookings of several thousand individuals who were attempting to take advantage of an error a third-party software provider made when it applied an incorrect currency exchange rate, despite United having properly filed its fares. Most of these bookings were for travel originating in the United Kingdom, and the level of bookings made with Danish Kroner as the local currency was significantly higher than normal during the limited period that customers made these bookings.”
Screenshot taken from Twitter
The question is, do airlines have to honor fare mistakes?
Brian Kelly, editor of The Points Guy, recently answered this question, stating:
“I don’t see what legal basis United has for backing out, but I’m sure right now there’s a room full of people working to find one. The bottom line is that airlines can’t change the price after they sell and ticket (which is what happened here) even if a glitch is in play.”
This is a Department of Transportation rule, so United will need to get creative if it wanted to legally cancel these fares. Moreover, voiding the sold tickets may be a huge PR mistake. Kelly notes,
“I think United has much to gain by currying favor (as Etihad did recently) and leveraging this as an opportunity to apologize for all the horrible IT mistakes and meltdowns the airline has had over the years.”
However, as Ben Schlappig at One Mile at a Time points out, while booking typical mistake fares, some people don’t understand the fare is a result of a glitch, but in this particular case, virtually everybody taking advantage knew what they were doing, as evidence by the following reasons:
- You specifically had to go to the Danish United website to book the fare out of the UK
- You had to state you had a Danish billing address, which I’d be willing to bet a vast majority of people didn’t have
- Other websites didn’t show the same fare
Schlapping argues that this was simply a matter of a few thousand people trying to game the system, and expecting United to honor these tickets seems a bit unreasonable.
What do you think?