Originally Posted by
Fast6
Mmmmm, I'd tend to disagree. What if you need to pee in the middle of making a booking? She clicked through the purchase process without, apparently, encountering any timeout warnings, account signouts, etc, and the fare changed? That's not right. Sheesh, even when I order lunch at work, I have a timer from when the sandwich is placed into the cart telling me how long I have to complete the order.
Pretty sure that there are rules surrounding fare pricing in cases like this. Either the poster was gone for 10'+ and the fare was released (and/or she got signed out), or she got on the wrong side of a bug in the booking engine.
NZ have always made it clear that bookings are not confirmed and no seats are held until a booking reference is issued.
If the website was offering
Colours the last 2 seats in J class (as there were 2 pax), it is very likely that one of two things occurred during the 5 minutes that
Colours was away from their computer.
1. A person booked a J class seat reducing the availability to J1. This means that the customer would not longer be able to book two people on the 'deal'
2. Someone booked two or more seats in biz reducing J inventory to J0.
This happens all the time. Just try booking flights during a major event period and you will get the "Sorry, no more seats available" message constantly.