Originally Posted by frb98mf

The main issue is that this was a YBH fare which sophisticated travellers might have picked up on (flexible terms and conditions, 70 TPs and high Avios earning was a clue), so people were able to book for under £200 on days where the cabin was almost full. That's why BA are making their claim of manifest error and have calculated that the lost revenue potential of selling even a few hundred of those 2,000 seats at their full price was worth the bad PR and £200k of vouchers to go after.

The potential flaw is in understanding the breakdown of who bought the 2,000 seats, why, and when they were travelling.

Take the largely off-peak leisure traveller - what BA have done in effect is offer a £100 voucher to save £90 in cash to attract those customers who are really price-sensitive and would normally take an LCC, per this quote:



This is obviously pretty bad business for BA, and appalling for reputation and customer retention. If they have any sense, such people will rebook to TLV on a LCC and enjoy a free weekend in Europe at BA's expense some other time.

For those who piled in to do a mileage run, they've won £100 for about 5 minutes of work and a bit of credit card churn. This could have been offset by writing to all customers saying the manifest error was in the fare class, rather than the price, and either a full refund (no comp) would be given or pax could accept it being moved into a non-flexible, non-Avios/TP-earning bucket, which might have chased off the majority of the runners, whilst maintaining the loyalty and PR value of folks who really didn't spot the error.

For a tiny number of genuine frequent travellers on this route who give BA their business, and might have found these prices suspiciously low for the time of year, they too now have £100 to spend on a flight they would possibly have booked anyway, whereas in my proposal they could have just written off the miles earning and taken the flight, and their loyalty is actually worth something to BA.

My guess is that with the strategy of making it a booking class error instead of a pricing error, and switching it to an X fare or whatever instead, BA would have spent much less than £200k and hugely mitigated the terrible publicity.