Independence Air will honor free tickets from online glitch

By MICHAEL COUSINEAU
Union Leader Staff

MANCHESTER - Financially struggling Independence Air posted an air fare sale on its Web site yesterday and customers briefly found the airline's online prices unbeatable.

Try free.

A "computer glitch" allowed fliers for less than an hour early yesterday to book flights with a listed airfare of zero, airline spokesman Rick DeLissi confirmed yesterday.

One Manchester passenger booked two one-way trips from Rochester, N.Y., to Manchester for $20.40 each, which represented taxes and fees. He saved $79 on each ticket - the airfare cost being offered on the airline's Web site yesterday.

"I could have booked a vacation for the whole family for almost nothing, exploiting the situation a bit," said the flier, who asked not to be named. "It seemed likely they hadn't intended to sell their flights quite this cheap."

DeLissi said fewer than 100 tickets were sold for the zero fare when a computer glitch occurred sometime after midnight.

"For those people who booked at that zero-dollar fare, we're going to honor it," he said. "It's our mistake."

The airline posted a sale on www.flyi.com yesterday offering fares from $49 to $79 each way.

"At the time we were changing the fares to sales fares, which usually happens during the overnight hours, for a brief period of time, a computer glitch had some people seeing fares at zero dollars," DeLissi said.

He didn't know the value of the lost ticket revenue or if anyone bought more than one ticket.

"An unexpected treat and congratulations to those who happened to be booking at midnight," DeLissi said.

As this glitch was never posted in this forum & this is specifically related to DH, I will go ahead & move this thread into the Independece Air forum. Please continue discussion there.

Thanks!

bhatnasx
Mileage Run Moderator

Wow. This shows proof that our FT community doesnt always find the killer deals. I'm surprised nobody found and posted this to the Mileage Run forum yesterday.

Given that DH's iClub is based on fare, this would make for pretty bad mileage run!

I wish someone would've posted about this!!!!

"At the time we were changing the fares to sales fares, which usually happens during the overnight hours, for a brief period of time, a computer glitch had some people seeing fares at zero dollars," DeLissi said. "

Chances are most of us were asleep... I guess we can't be on guard 24/7 on all sites

Regardless, this brings up a point or topic that I thought was mentioned in the past... having having some kind of software dig for this stuff.

Too bad we couldn't subscribe to a service where we could have software/people find these fares. They can get a bonus/commission for finding these deals. Maybe have some kid in India surf the web all day looking for this stuff... well, another idea in the circular file.

Ok... its a little bit of a stretch, but I've often wondered if an airline has ever intentionally "accidently" left a $0 fare in the system just to get publicity. Of course you couldn't do it with too many seats, but I've read articles in USAToday and other major media sources about other carriers having computer glitches that sold tickets for practically nothing, and the articles do a great job catching the readers attention and plugging the airline (for example, the article on DH highlights the fall fare sale). I wonder if any airline has ever looked into the amount of revenue lost vs. the amount of potential revenue brought in from the added exposure.

It was posted over at Fatwallet for a second, and I went to the site but it was out of service. I was looking around for my NOV vegas deals and saw the error, but could not book it.

I've wondered about the same thing, in Europe it seems to work. From memory, MyAir had a 1 (Euro) cent sale last year and Ryanair has fares for less than 10 Euro sometimes. Must be cheaper than buying advertising space.

to you, what were you doing, why didn't you post it sheesh

In April, US Airways -- while operating under bankruptcy protection -- set off a buying frenzy when it sold round-trip tickets for $1.86 to eight cities. Nearly 1,000 of the tickets were sold.

Also in April, travelers snatched up $51 fares on Travelocity between Los Angeles and Fiji.

Huh? Had I known, I would've gladly posted. I find it hard to believe that no one on the whole of Flyertalk knew about this when it was happening.

We got one of the $0 fares on Delta from IAD-PWM. Had to cancel, but DL refunded the taxes (to my surprise).

are we all greedy, jealous, and desiring? The key to a clean mind is to reduce & eliminate lusts and desires. Think about how you live your life. "To love, there is no border"

They're supposed to do that, even when you cancel a non-refundable ticket.