Originally Posted by Tiki

I don't have a dog in this fight but I am just wondering how this mistake could have happened in the first place? HKG is in the South Asia zone, China is in the North Asia zone so it wasn't a misprogramming of a zone award. Hong Kong uses HKD and China uses CNY so it's not the currency. It seems to me it has to be deliberate-someone at UA, maybe in the Chinese office wanted his family to get cheap tickets or something so he messed with the programming, then couldn't switch it back. Or a disgruntled employee who was made redundant could have done it on purpose. I just can't see how this could have been a real glitch to have that effect. A real glitch would have been leaving off a few decimal places or something.

Are there any computer experts here who can explain how this could have happened? Just curious!

Also, since this wasn't a "fire sale" or we all would have gotten emails to promote it, it seemed to have been spread by bloggers and on forums. The people spreading it were experienced enough to know that it was a glitch but kept urging people to hurry up and get in on it and "don't call the airline". Would they have some shared responsibility in the financial liability of UA if they honor these tickets?

What went viral on English language forums and blogs is probably only the tip of the iceberg, there must be thousands of Chinese language speakers who spread this around too.