Photo: Travel Collector/Flickr
A good pricing glitch might be harder to find after United and American have both vowed to prevent mistake fares from happening. United and American Airlines have clenched their collective jaws after a widely reported glitch in February, which allowed quick typing customers to book first class and business class United flights for as little as $75.
The glitch was caused by third-party software that got clumsy when it converted Danish kroner into other currencies. To book the flights, customers had to access the Danish version of United’s website and set their home country as Denmark, two little Scandinavian lies that were enough for United to argue that it didn’t have to honor the fares (and the Department of Transportation sided with the airline, ruling that customers “misrepresented their billing address country” and tried to take advantage of a price that wasn’t offered to U.S. residents).
Even though United could smugly say “We told you so,” it would prefer to avoid those situations entirely. According to Brian Sumers, the airline will be creating a Digital Operations Center at its Chicago headquarters designed entirely to monitor “commercial impacts, fraudulent activity and end user manipulations.” The new system might not prevent all mistake fares from happening, but it hopes to catch them sooner, before The Internet figures it out and hundreds of glitch-fare flights are booked. In a note to employees, airline officials wrote
[The Flyertalk website] picked up on [a pricing error] within 30 minutes; however we did not discover it for 50 minutes. After discovery, it took just over 20 minutes to fix this issue; however over the entire duration of 70 minutes we lost $2.9M […] Proactive monitoring will improve reliability of our digital channels, increase customer trust by proactively managing issues, and avoid costly PR and litigation.
American Airlines will try to prevent customers from taking advantage of pricing errors by adding some new fine print to the Terms and Conditions of its Double Elite Qualifying Points promotion: ““Airline tickets issued as a result of airfare offered inadvertently or by mistake will not be eligible for elite-qualifying points.” That doesn’t seem like an effective deterrent, especially if you’ve just scored a fantastic deal.
If you do see a fare that looks too good to be true, it might be. But if it doesn’t require adopting a fake Danish accent, knowingly manipulating a website or other trickery, there’s a chance that the airline will have to honor the ticket, at least acording to the Department of Transportation rules.