Originally Posted by
yerffej201
They absolutely could have zeroed out inventory, and that would be that. But were are discussing hypotheticals - CX has not done that, and whether you feel personally entitled to the fare conditions given the circumstances does not matter in a dispute. The point I'm trying to make is in regards to the contract and fare that has been offered - irrelevant of what should have happened and the ethical perspectives surrounding the situation.
They did that in the beginning to stop people from changing this to preferred dates (read: most popular dates for the route concerned).
Ethical perspectives? I'd reckon that since CX has publicly admitted to making a mistake here and will honour tickets which have been bought for 800-1500 USD instead of 20K-30K USD doesnt exactly make this unethical in any way, especially since most people on this very forum are aware that most sales they stumble upon are indeed unintentional.
The only situation in which one could argue that the non-adherence to their own fare rules is unethical would be for someone who bought this without even suspecting that this may be unintentional. The probability that even just one of the thousands of bookings they got for the route has been done by a completely unaware person just randomly searching for fares between Da Nang and New York on NYE is rather slim I guess.
For me, this whole special sale business is a game between the airlines and the travelling public. If a passenger makes a mistake, airlines wont budge. So if the airline makes a mistake, some of us go ahead and book these fares. Some airlines will openly (CX) or rather silently honour the fare they sold (i.e. Aeroflot recently), others will refund and cancel, and then theres some who go shady ways (Alitalia christmas sale with non-communicated cxls). The latter ones are are fair game to me, i.e. not to be spared, while I'll just accept defeat on the second kind and will be thankful to the first kind.
That being said, again, I would expect CX to cancel any ticket for free if asked to do so, especially as they are not honouring the fare rules with regards to changes in restricted booking classes (J,D,I,A AFAIK). I completely fail to see any unethical behavior on CX' side here.