Originally Posted by teddy25

where should DOT draw the line on the size of the error, for honoring the tickets?

4 miles?
40 miles?
400 miles?
4,000 miles?
40,000 miles?

Will the people say it is unethical to travel on the 4 miles fare be ok with a 40, 400, or 4000 miles mistake fare?

you can NOT tell me 4,000 or even 40,0000 miles for first class round trip tickets to HKG is ethical if you think 4 is unethical. what is the difference if you know a big error made by the United's IT department?

would you have taken advantage of the error at 4,000 or 40,000 miles?

I just don't see any difference. going 40 mph or 50 mph on a 30 mph road are both speeding.

Originally Posted by janetdoe

There is a point where it is no longer a 'incredible deal/steal' but just a 'discounted price'.

4,000 - Yes I would have taken it. That's still less than 10% of the normal cost.
40,000 - Maybe, if that was the round-trip total. Definitely wouldn't have booked more than one.

But driving 100 in a 30 mph is "driving with intent to kill". There are degrees of egregiousness for almost any violation.

Originally Posted by MarkXS

What most posters are missing is that there's a subtext to the DOT regulations, and we should be seeing it: The reason that the regulations explicitly say "mistake fares" are covered and cannot be raised after ticketing is to provide a deterrent from sloppy practices, deliberately or not, by inflicting a penalty on the airline that tries to get away with weaseling out of honoring its mistakes.

Mistakes aren't supposed to happen. That's why they're called mistakes. "Miss-takes."

In the past, airlines had impunity when the made a mistake. Now the DOT regulations say, "tough luck Charlie, eat it and let the customer fly."

If eating it causes millions of dollars in losses to the airline, than that's a darn good "teachable moment" to encourage that and other airlines to fix their business processes, controls, and systems to not do it again.

All us current or ex-UA/CO flyers are pretty disgusted with all the systems and business processes and bad decisions around IT and training resulting from the botched merger, right? Well isn't making United eat it and honor these EXACTLY the kind of lesson SMI/J needs to get about how much he screwed up? Me buying flights on Taca, LAN, and Alaska instead of UA doesn't exactly send a message the way a DOT order to honor the tickets or pay the fine does.

I didn't get in on this one, and I had no excuse, because I wasn't in jail without WiFi (to paraphrase MommyPoints BoardingArea blog.) So I don't have a dog in this race. I've never gotten this good a deal; just the Y-cabin $314 LAS to MUC and $214 LAX-LHR LH/UA combo meals a few years back, and getting screwed out of a better one on Air Canada a couple of years ago, months after booking. But this is now, and the DOT rules are now different and stronger, and explicit that mistakes must be ordered.

Those same rules also require one cash price quote, without the nonsense about what's base fare, YQ, taxes, 9/11 fee etc - it's got to be quoted as "what does the customer's form of payment get charged to be able to fly on the plane?" Put that concept together with the "mistakes must be honored" and these tickets did cost money, did have value other than the miles. A monkey could see that UA has very little wiggle room here, and that their UA Insider response was old-rules-thinking.

UA screwed up, and under the law nowadays in the USA, they have to honor their screwup. Which is a great incentive to stop screwing up.

Originally Posted by rankourabu

Wow lots of bitter people here who didn't get a ticket and now pulling the ethics card!
?

Originally Posted by Antepali

So what do we do? If we have tickets for travel in the next week do we just show up to the airport and travel as we normally would?
I would hate to go to the airport and be told-- sorry but we can't honor this ticket, etc, and have a dilemma.

Do we call UA to reconfirm or something-- but we're attracting more attneinton? Not sure...