Originally Posted by
shd9
The website is indeed sometimes quite annoying. If you submit a payment and it errors out to the “technical fault” page, there is no way you can get the PNR and start that payment again.
If this ghost reservation pulls away the last available seat in an inventory, starting a new search means a higher price, and it may be hours before AA catches that mistake and cancel the ghost PNR (thus releasing the inventory back again)
Frankly, I believe Hayes got shafted. Reading it again, he very well could have been just a guy who was really excited about his trip to Europe, so he did some weird things on the website, and got burned for behaving abnormally.
The OP in this scenario, though, I can't really say... it really depends on whether he had knowledge that the bookings were fraudulent (that proper payment had not been made by the required time). It could theoretically be a very extreme mistake. But you'd have to assume that the extreme is true.