If I recall, QR was promoting a whole raft of fares at the time to coincide with a 5x promotion (don't recall the name of it). This fare wasn't the only one that was a very good deal. In the past two January months there have been some very good options. Similarly the offer from Star Alliance has been Northern Europe to west coast USA, so there are patterns. I don't follow Star Alliance so I can't say whether they promoted this much - I very much doubt they would promote it for the sake of 2 hours booking window. Either way, I'm sure they've brought a lot of new customers to try out options that they would never have done before. We flew Air Canada earlier in the year in business and would never have done that if we hadn't flown to Seattle (on a great deal) the previous year. Similarly, I wouldn't be looking to book QR in business to SE Asia for next year if I hadn't experienced their excellent business class beforehand. You get used to great service and to a certain extent can be content with paying more when you know what you're getting - that's probably why I'm open minded to the idea that airlines market themselves in this social media era by lowering prices to give people a taster of something different. Many of us wouldn't think twice to spending 3k for a couple tickets to Asia, while in the past we'd have been looking at an economy tickets for a total of 1k.