Originally Posted by channa

Of course they track complaints. But they're also a common carrier, so retaliating against someone for complaining would get them in even hotter water. If you paid them $2,700 for a ticket and they voided it, that's a valid complaint. They are likely expecting a number of complaints off of this and it's part of their risk calculation.

Personally, I think anyone impacted should complain to DOT. The real problem here is not so much DL, rather the DOT allowing carriers to claim "mistake" on anything and get out of it with a refund and expense reimbursement. If they can void $2,700 tickets without penalty, that's not a precedent anyone wants set. And as you point out, there's no other compromise options on the table.

While it would be nice to get DL to reinstate this, the ultimate goal should be to challenge the the mistake threshold and easy out for the airline, as this fare is not clearly "substantially lower" than normal given normal airline pricing spreads.

I bought OAK-ATL RT in Main on DL last week for $212 base fare on a sale. There's literally a Y fare published in that market for $13,842, about 65 times what I paid. If they want to maintain pricing like that as "normal", there needs to be some higher bar to define "mistake" or at a minimum, some penalty regardless. $2,700 is not chump change and is 1/13th of the top F fare in this market, which is arguably not a low fare based on fares in other markets.

Ideally, there would be some financial penalty to the airline for claiming a mistake. Say, refund + 50% if they cancel within 24 hours; refund + 100% if they cancel within 3 days; refund + 200% if they cancel after 3 days. That way an obscenely low mistake canceled quickly wouldn't cost them much. But something like this would cost them serious cash.