BA not honouring 'mistake' F fare to Equador
 

BA not honouring the cheap first class fares to Ecuador that was posted about 2 days ago , they are "mistake fares" according to BA !? :(


(Ermm FYI my post was in another thread as a singular post , seems a mod has made it into a thread ? )

In fairness, c.£800 return to South America, from LHR, in F, is clearly a mistake. Win some, lose some.

Come on, they are mistake fares. Anyway, there is extensive discussion on the threads on the premium fares board about the issue.

Quite, apparently it was a misfiled economy fare.

That more or less less matches my own experience but I usually look to start my trips in DUB so no immigration issues in the US at all. In the past it also has tended to be much cheaper although the halcyon days of a couple of years ago may never return I fear.

There was no way to know this Ecuador fare was a for sure a mistake fare. First off, plenty of time had lapsed before they announced it was a mistake. In addition BA/AA offered flights a year ago DUB-HNL for $600 in Premium cabins. Someone posted they flew BA F from DXB-AUS on BA F for $1200. BA often releases flash F sales at this time of the year. If you go right now on the premium fare deals forum there are plenty of fares you could pick out that you would think were mistake fares and they are not. There was no reason to assume this BA trip, which was half in J, wasn’t some flash sale. It’s not as cut and dry as some people are making it out to be.

So now BA just gets to arbitrarily cancel these itineraries because people got a good deal, and BA doesn’t like the fare they got? Well they shouldn’t have published the fare then. To make matters even more insulting, they didn’t even bother to acknowledge or take any responsibility for the mistake in the letter they sent out explaining they were cancelling tickets and insist they “aren’t responsible for money lost” as a result of them booking, confirming, and issuing these tickets. So people with repositioning tickets, hotels, and fees charged by travel agencies, at least according to BA, it’s the passengers problem.

But if I had wanted to cancel or change dates on this ticket, I would have been charged exuberant fees, however BA gets to just cancel the tickets and not reimburse anyone for anything. How is that fair in anyway?

Inspection of the fare rules will reveal a lot of information about the fare.

This is nonsense - the most recent DUB-HNL was approx 20 months ago for £1,100.

Ethics around BA's cancellation behaviour aside, this really was an obvious error fare.

Will you please give it a rest, we've heard you. Now take relevant legal action should you wish, or chalk it up to experience. This forum does not need to be littered with ongoing debate on these fares, errors or not. It has been done time and time again and always results in the same outcome.

What about them? I don’t know about you, but I imagine 99.9% of people see a good deal and book it. They don’t comb over the fine print thinking BA is going to just cancel their ticket.

Think of the sweeping power this precedent now sets for BA. Booked a really good deal in any class of service on BA? Too bad, BA could cancel it anytime they want and claim it’s a mistake fare. This is not okay on any level. Let alone how rules and change fees apply to the customer, but when BA makes a mistake they don’t have to play by the same rules, and can just cancel your ticket if they feel like it. It totally strips passengers of any rights. Why does BA get to operate outside rules, and do as they please after a ticket has been confirmed and issued with a ticket number?

And this fare was £797 and a shorter distance then DUB-HNL which was honored. So why would I assume this is a mistake fare?

In England, the precedent was set in 1939. I imagine Seattle has a similar common law interpretation of mistakes. If it doesn't, bring your claim. Arguing about old dead fares is not productive.

Nobody is arguing. I’m just showing people what a dangerous precedent this sets, and the abusive over reaching power it grants BA.

You're talking total rubbish. I imagine 99.9% *do not* just book an F fare that's the same price as economy normally is on the route without at least considering if it could be a mistake. There are also several reasons an airline can legally cancel an itinerary after it is ticketed, so that's a non-starter. I'm not even going to comment on the comedy hyperbole of 'it strips passengers of any rights'.

Good luck with your legal claim, I'd save your arguments for that rather than wasting your time arguing with people here over it.

Mods: would be great if someone could put all this discussion in a separate thread somewhere so that this thread can go back to highlighting good premium cabin deals! :)

Understood. And my intentions are not to argue, or make anyone upset. All I want to do is show that the logic of BA can do as they please and cancel tickets whenever they feel like it, arbitrarily, is a dangerous precedent to set. I’ve made my point (I hope) and will not bother you any longer.

Cheers

The £1,100 figure quoted was for J, opposed to F.

F Fares to the same destination would price up at a substantially higher level.

Good luck with the legal action.

M

It was in First, which is usual at least 50% high priced than J? It is 50% lower than the lowest ever Honolulu fare, ex-EU? It was from LHR, not an ex-EU? It was roughly the same price Economy is normally?

And making up, what was it, a $600, which would be a £400 ex DUB HNL fare won't help make any points...

Some of these are clearly mistake fares. You take a chance, sometimes you get a great cheap trip, but if you're booking positioning and hotels then its your money wasted, don't expect courts or travel insurance to pay out on any good faith...

Thank you.

Yes, but as I said, another poster flew BA F from DXB-AUS for $1200. Also, go look at the multitude of fares right now in the premium fare section that you would almost be certain are mistake fares, in much better and nicer cabins might I add, and they aren’t mistake fares.

People act as though BA F is some sort of holy grail of a product, when in fact most airline’s J cabins are better. So this notion that “well it’s BA F” doesn’t mean anything to me. Not to mention you have to remember 50% of the itinerary, whether going through JFK or MIA, was continuing on in business class. So it wouldn’t be crazy since 50% of the ticket is in J that it was only $1050.

Oh yeah one would assume that , but when BA do not cancel it for more then 48hrs+ after posting it one does think it might be set in stone. My post was purely to alert others that it was officially not being honoured by BA as i saw nothing mentioned about it being official that BA aren't honouring it ;)

Just for my information, can someone confirm the timeline on the Panama Hat fare ?

I was under the impression that the fare became unavailable within 2 hours of being loaded. It may well have taken BA a further 46 hours or so to cancel tickets issued during that first short window, but this has little bearing on the qualitative nature of the error...

indeed I would say that such a quick initial reaction strongly suggests the following sequence of events: economy fare filed as First/Business through human error, system quickly notices and sends a text alert to the relevant BA manager, manager wakes up (this is the early hours of the UK morning dont't forget), logs on, assesses the situation, then hits "Withdraw".

Later that day, RM review the tickets issued on that fare, confirm they are in error, check that no-one really important will be affected by a cancellation, probably send it up to Legal for a rubberstamp, this comes back the following afternoon, final meeting is that evening, emails go out that night - 48 hours can easily pass in this scenario...

This is wrong I believe. I saw the fare and talked about it to a friend who was looking for tickets to Ecuador. He did not checked this was a mistake and would have booked if I had not told him to consider it. During the good old times of the summer intern working on Thursdays, I discussed error fare with friends and family. None of them would even consider it a mistake, they would just click and could not understand how it could be wrong.
I am relatively confident that if you present this fare to 1000 random people, there will not be 999 to say "Wait a minute"

I'm not sure if you perhaps misunderstood what I was trying to say. I'm suggesting that more than 1 out of every 1,000 people will surely wonder if this fare is a mistake, which is what Edgerfly was suggesting. I'm not suggesting that only 1 in 1,000 people would not realise this was an error, which as you correctly point out is also surely incorrect.

The OP may wish to consider, before commencing any legal action or complaining rather too loudly, that he also has a post in the UK & Ireland forum where he writes about not booking hotel rooms on pre-pay because he is unsure as to whether or not BA will honour a fare.

Might that suggest that, perhaps, he had a reasonable inkling that the price was an error? @:-)

The posts in this thread would provide more than an 'inking':

https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/mile...ess-797-a.html

Thank you! Very much!

Mmmm indeed....more bleating sheep than a Scottish hillside. :D

If you look at the ops blog as well it was clear he had more than an inkling it was a mistake fare. Someone who has status and redeems miles as much as he does would be more than qualified to identify a mistake fare imo.

I haven't followed all the threads on this. Is the OP suggesting it wasn't a mistake or considering legal action?

Looks like you really dodged a bullet there. BA F being so bad would have ruined your trip - I assume you're still travelling to Equador since thats where you really wanted to go anyway....

Not the first time I’ve been stalked and attacked about my posts all around flyertalk from BA apologists on this forum so I’m use to this behavior.

Go to the premium fare deals now, BA/AA are offering a $1500 fare from CAI-HNL right now. Is that a mistake fare too? I guess it’s not until BA decides it is.

Many of you are actually missing the point here. Doesn’t matter if it was a mistake fair or not. British Airways published the fare, accepted people’s payment, and issued tickets. End of story. They cannot go back 60 hours later and say, “we’ll we decided we don’t like the price, so now we’re gonna cancel it.” If it it was 12 hours or within the 24 hour window we are provided, then I would have no problem with their cancellation.

The point is they can’t arbitrarily decide the rules. That’s unfair, and bad business. In addition they’ve taken no responsibility for the fare they’ve published, and they’re not even offering to accommodate people, who have let’s say booked nonrefundable hotels. Did you even said the egregious letter they sent out to people who’ve booked this fare?

This has nothing to do with BA and everything to do with the clear record that you have made here on FT to the effect that you knew, at the time you booked, that it was a mistake fare.

No matter what the situation is for the other routes you cite and the fact that there may be dirt cheap fares to TOM (Timbuktu in case you aren't intimately familiar with IATA codes!), in this particular situation, you took a no cost gamble and did not succeed.

How is it "stalking" to look at other relevant posts by a poster on a subject

It seems to me, from posts around, that none actually believed it to be a genuine fare

Are you claiming , that despite posts made, that you genuinely believed that not to be a mistake fare?

Cairo is a completely different market to London plus this is business class and not a 1st class fare ; the 1st class fare is $4,341

Not apologists but realists who cannot be fooled by those who would like to think they know better than everybody else.

And, as has been pointed out previously, I am sure that the fare you refer to is in J, it is not ex-LHR and is still more than the mistake fare you so willingly tried to purchase knowing full well it was not valid. And that's without taking account of the poor state of the Egyptian economy and the impact this has on fares.

But don't let any of this get in the way of your pursuit of a remedy. Personally I would
love for BA to counter claim against all those who they can prove knowingly attempted to purchase the error fare and are trying to enforce it. To me there is only one greedy side in all of this and it isn't BA. I have no sympathy for those who brought this fare and had it cancelled as suspect 99.9% only did so because they saw a deal too good to be true.

And for the the record I was awake at the time and did look at it and could have purchased, but really had no desire to go to GYE irrespective of the cost.

Actually only 50% of the itinerary is F, the rest is J. There’s no reason to immidiately assume it was immidiately a mistake fare. I was being told by others who’ve done this before me it’s a mistake fare which is why I didn’t book anything non-refundable. And you all act as if BA F is some holy grail. It’s nothing more than a good business class seat anyway. Most everyone would rather fly AA J across the pond. I know I would.

Sounds like that will be for a judge to decide when you follow it up.

Oh don't come the raw prawn man! You knew it was a mistake fare. Move on.

Well if that's the way you feel you've had a lucky escape. Good luck with finding an equivalent flight on AA for anything like this. But then you would already have known that before you brought your ticket.

Perhaps it is time we stopped feeding the trolls.

With all the cheap J and upgradable J fares BA publishes across the globe (you can go look now at the premium fare section of MR) it was not clear. It obviously wasn’t too clear to BA either if it took them almost three days to send out a letter.

Sure your countries airline is great with 8 across in J, no internet access, old planes, and some of the worst customer service in probably the entire industry.

Boring. As mentioned previously the fare was pulled within hours of becoming available/known about. Keep clutching at those straws - if you get enough of them you could tie them together and make a raft to sail across the ocean on.