Originally Posted by yogi

It was on regular US CNN at about 5:50 PM, "Situation Room with Wolfe Blitzer".

Blitzer: With the summer vacation season nearing, how would you like a business class round trip airline ticket to Europe for $40 dollars? $40 dollars. Now hundreds of travelers are claiming they are entitled to just that, exposing some of the flaws that come with booking travel online. Our internet report Jacki Shechner is joining us with the latest. $40, not too bad...
(subtitle: Travel Trip-up)

Shechner: Not bad. $33 US dollars, $39 Canadian dollars.
(screen shot of flyertalk home page)
(sub-title, online airline booking glitch results in $2 million mistake)
There is an online comunity of people who on frequent flyer mile enthusiests, they get online and talk about these things and they are notorious for pointing out flaws in the airlines whenever they make mistakes online.
(sub-title: Roundtrip Business class tickets mistakenly sold for $39)
Well, very early Wednesday morning somebody noticed a glitch in an Alitalia flight you could go from Toronto to Cypruss via Milan for $39 Canadien dollars.

(on screen, circles $39, also shows Tacles of 193.77 and service fee of 7.00 for total price of CAD 229.77)

That translates to approxamately $33 US dollars.

(sub-title: Italian Airline will honor about 500 accidentally booked flights)

This spread fast.

(screen changes to post from 1:31 AM: Suddnely, I feel sorry for Alitalia )

About 500 tickets were booked on Alitalia.

(screen changes to Alitalia website homepage)

Now we spook to them today. They say they are going to honor the tickets that were booked and actually ticketed. But there is also a grey area between the time that you book and you ticket, and those are not going to be honored, but if you book through a site like Orbits they are going to refund you that booking fee.

(screen change to orbitz)

Now we also spoke to Travelocity that refered us back to Alitalia and Expedia did not return our calls. Wolfe.

Blitzer: Thanks very much for that: $33 dollars, US dollars. $39 Canadien.