donotblink

Yes, seriously. Not something I would attempt, but I don't know that this particular question has been answered in this thread.

moondog

I highly doubt we'll hear back from the OP again. Apart from all of us (justifiably) ragging on him, drawing additional attention to his immoral practices is just plain stupid. My guess is that AA will NOT attempt to prosecute him as long as he leaves them alone.

When you first asked this question, I was assuming you were referring to AA closing the loophole that the OP exposed. I presume they will fix this at some point, but from my own experience working in IT, it takes a bit of time to push even small issues through.

donotblink

I did mean did AA close the loophole, but there's two (or more) ways to skin the cat. The best way is to fix the issues with the website, but they could also have corporate security (or another group) do daily audits for this type of thing and manually cancel the PNRs. Depending on the APIs they have available to Sabre (not something I'm super familiar with, they could close them that way too.)

sbrower

I find these threads fascinating because they show what different perspectives we have on matters. This isn't a loophole, it is a business enhancing decision which was maliciously exploited. If a LEGITIMATE customer tries to purchase with a credit card, but types in a wrong digit, or a wrong expiration date, it is in AA's interest to give that person an opportunity to provide accurate information. Because they WANT to sell that ticket. But if someone uses that delay in a malicious manner once or twice or even several times (depending on the nature of the exploit) that goes into the same bucket as shoplifting. That is, even if there is some shoplifting happening in a store, they don't give every customer a hand-search at the exit door. They take precautions, they try to catch the major offenders, but they continue to put out items that COULD be stolen in the hope that the honest customers buy enough to make up for the dishonest ones. Think of the few people who have been prosecuted for buying a first class ticket, visiting the first class lounge, then cancelling the ticket. I bet that has been done by more customers than the number who have been fired/sued by the airline. Not because the airline doesn't know that it happened, but because it isn't worth trying to prosecute every individual who does it once. And I almost hate to say this (because some of you are not as honest as me), but based on the published cases, the people who got publicly known for that stunt did it more than 20 times. In other words, you don't punish every legit case of one-off bad conduct, but if someone is an intentional multiple abuser (as the OP readily admits here), then the exception gets noted.

Mark_T

What issues?

All of this depends very directly on that wonderful legal phrase 'mens rea', the intent in the mind of the person doing it...

Failing to notice you were at your credit card limit is not a crime and the airline will want to make sure that a sale is not lost in such cases...

Deliberately providing a payment method that you know is going to fail so you can obtain a longer hold period than you are entitled to is fraud.

So, nothing to fix really.

JonNYC

None of this is necessary for the reasons other posters have pointed out-- it's a total non-issue.

stephem

I had no idea this sort of thing was possible, I had an old card in my AA profile for a while and it would error out rather than complete, asking for an updated expiration date. I suppose if you had a valid expiration date and just transpose a couple of numbers in the account number then this might "work." I think other carriers may have this "not a bug but a feature" as well. Last night I was paying for upgrades on an Alaska flight once we had checked in and we were spread across a few reservations so I was getting careless typing in my CC # by the third reservation trying to get the upgrades before someone else did. I didnt really pay attention to the alerts on the screen, just to the emails that were popping up on my phone showing the upgrade and reticketing for each reservation. This morning I had to call in to may an additional change to the ticket and the agent pointed out that the charge hadnt gone through for one of the reservations, although we were seated in F, as if the charge had gone through. She said the system would just try recharging over the next few days, but when I asked if was a CC# error she realized it was and took down the correct number to make sure the payment would go through. So I guess you could run up a tab with AS for paid upgrades at checkin by giving an erroneous CC# if you wanted to play that game. Paging OP, I think I found a new carrier for you ;-)

QueenOfCoach

I am a database administrator for a company similar to an airline. Bean-counting is my job.

The airline has determined, over a long period of time with millions of transactions, how they can best realize max revenue. I can well imagine they tried many variations of the pre-purchase hold. I can imagine they modeled various hold times and have found the 24 hour hold to midnight of the next day works the best. It allows the customer the opportunity to lock in a ticket, get hotel reservations, check with business folks or family members, then if all is well, purchase the ticket. A day seems to be plenty of time for this kind of thing, for most customers.

Thus, pricing, yield management, bucket allotments, etc., are all based on that 24-hour hold.

Along comes a customer who has figured out how to get a longer hold, thus busting the model.

As in my job, no one cares about a one-off. There are too many legitimate reasons why a one-off can occur, be it hidden city ticketing (eg), or in this case an invalid credit card. They will crack down when the pattern is repeated, and rightly so in my opinion.

jordyn

Well, to be clear, my point was that Often1 asserted that there was some obvious text that indicated this and provided no reason why it would be the case otherwise. It seems like we all agree that's obviously not true, so now we're into questions of general-purpose contract law? That's fine, but a different type of claim.

I actually think there's a much better case that this is fraud (i.e, that OP was trying to trick AA into giving them something of value under false pretenses) than that clicking "Pay Now" creates a contract regardless of the outcome. There's two pretty obvious reasons why the latter is not the case:

1) People do not reasonably expect that if payment fails that they're still committed to the transaction. Imagine you thought you had a gift card worth $500 but it really only had $300 on it, and you were booking an optional trip under the assumption your gift card would pay for it. Most people would not expect that if the gift card had insufficient funds and AA didn't ticket the transaction that they'd still be stuck owing money for it. (Same with declined credit cards, but I think the gift card makes it more clear because it's not a general-purpose payment instrument.) Similarly, most people do not click "Pay Now" expecting that the benefit is that they will hold inventory; what they want is to pay for a ticket. The fact that AA holds inventory but doesn't issue a ticket is interesting to AA but not the bargain that the customer expects to enter into (unless they're explicitly choosing the "Hold" function).

2) As others have pointed out, AA itself definitely does not treat the situation as having formed a valid contract until a ticket issued. If you click "Pay Now", get a confirmation, but never get a ticket issued for some reason (even if it's a technical glitch on AA's end), AA will not honor any of its commitments under the conditions of carriage. If AA doesn't think they are obligated to do anything until a ticket issues, the same is true in the other direction. Contracts don't become valid for one party at a different time than the counterparty.

moondog

Point well noted! I've honestly never come across a single other person like the OP in all of my years of travel/FT. As such, I want to redact my previous suggestion that an IT overhaul would be beneficial for AA. Simply developing algorithms to spot and stop the 1 in 10,000 who abuse the system seems preferable to preventing honest people from holding tickets. Off topic, one of the reasons I love FT is that you guys force me to think and rethink my ideas.

nk15

Ldnn1

Uncle Nonny

Capitalism, it's called. Buy a house. Rent an apartment. Buy a car. Buy something on Amazon. Dynamic pricing is all around us (unless you're in Cuba, North Korea, etc).

nk15

JonNYC