photo by eosdude
No matter how sophisticated technology becomes, glitches never fail to slip through the all the 1s and 0s. The latest glitch hit Qantas this week, when round-trip tickets from Australian cities to Los Angeles began showing up on booking site Hopper.com for as low as $A577 ($440 USD) and all the way down to $A286 ($218 USD) for one-way tickets on Skyscanner.
As tickets usually cost well over $A1,300, travelers began snapping up the cut-rate tickets until Qantas realized the problem and shut down the sales lickety split, telling news.com.au:
“There was a glitch that impacted third party USA-based online booking systems, as we made some fare changes effective 1 July for travel originating in Australia.”
In a similar recent situation, the Department of Transportation decided not to force United Airlines to honor mistake $75 round-trip business-class tickets from New York to London in February. Since then, United and American airlines have both vowed to prevent these mistakes from happening again, and the DOT released a statement saying it would not require airlines to honor mistake fares as long as they prove the fares were indeed a mistake.
screenshot of Hopper.com
Regardless of that precedent, Qantas announced via Twitter it would be honoring the fare.
It’s important to note that this situation is very different from the United incident, and Qantas probably honored the fare for multiple reasons.
1)A $440 economy ticket is not the same as a $75 business-class seat. In the United case, passengers actually had to go out of their way to lie and say they lived in Denmark in order to purchase tickets, and it was quite obvious that the fare was a mistake — people were just trying to cheat the system. In the case of Qantas, it’s very possible people simply thought there was an amazing sale, as a $440 ticket is realistic, if very unlikely.
2) It was probably worth honoring the fare just to avoid bad press and customer alienation that would’ve resulted from deciding not to honor a published fare. Fickle customers are not likely to be sympathetic that a fare is the fault of third-party technology rather than the fault of Qantas. Competition is tight and Qantas doesn’t want to drive customers elsewhere.
Sure, the airline may lose big dollars in the short term, but the profits, and customer loyalty, should be greater in the long run.