Originally Posted by
Cluster One
I don't have a direct interest in this particular fare, but:
Surely the TA must share some of the responsibility here? They should have realised that the price was way too low for the booking class*.
A non-FTer doing a web search would simply see a fare on BA that was of the same magnitude as fares on other airlines.
(*Assuming of course that humans are involved at any point in the pricing/selling process!)
OTA's would have no human involvement in these fares - they would be loaded, bookable and issues without any alerts as nothing unusual.
Regular human TA's of course could have picked up on it, but again, there was nothing ridiculously out of the ordinary about this - they would have quoted cheapest fares. Most would have paid little attention unless BA is their main issueing carrier as they don't memorise flexibility / TP's of all 16 economy subclasses of the 100 odd airlines they would book.
Genuinely, it's only people with the expertise on Flyertalk / multiple blogs that would have picked up anything massively out of the ordinary.
Virgin:
https://www.virginatlantic.com/gb/en/flight-deals.html £300 to Boston - 14 hours flying = £21.42 an hour
BA: £187 to Tel Aviv - 10 hours flying = £18.70 a hour
Not really a 'Manifest Error'. That's just the first example I thought of.