Up In The Air

Looks like they've started to fix it:
Yesterday LGW - TRN on 21st September was showing £77 in business and £212 in economy!!
Today the fares are back to normal.

newyorklondon

I keep reading this thread title as 'weird piercing'!

BarneyMcGrew

I keep reading it as 'Wired Pricing'!

Jim72

They've fixed the economy fares on the early August one-way LHR-VIE flights I'd been looking at the other day.

No longer only £537 Y fares available, economy fares of £111 upwards now showing.

CharlotteC

jerub

Huh. I just booked LHR-DUS in August and saw these weird prices.

I booked anyway. Out ET and back in CE, because that was cheaper (£190). Now same flights are £110 in ET both ways....

If this was genuinely a IT mistake, would BA rebook on the cheaper fares?

It doesnt matter a huge deal to me due to it being work travel, but I hate wasting money.

corporate-wage-slave

Are you within the 24 hour cooling off period? If not you could try the manifest error argument....

jerub

Sitting at about 48 hours, so can't use that (I did double-check).

I'll phone the gold line Monday and ask nicely if I have a dead moment.

Woodbinerich

I hope you snapped it up.

DFB_london

Woodbinerich

This raises a very (to me at least) interesting question.
Without re-hashing other threads/discussions we have seen many examples of airlines over the years cancelling tickets due to a "manifest" error where the price/booking class was too low. Have we ever seen an airline concede an IT glitch caused a price to be irrationally high. How would a customer argue this, if they have any legal basis to do so?
Genuinely don't know the answer to any of the above, but interested if anyone has anything to add here. It might help the poster on their case they will talk about on Monday as well.

jerub

The sort of problems that BA has in its IT world are not ones that can be fixed with a few fresh faces and a week. While I am frequently frustrated that things are not perfect, I do have a lot of respect for them for keeping everything running as well as it does, especially considering the huge number of systems integrations required. ​​​​

Not to mention that the airline industry is literally famous for having hard to integrate legacy systems.

criso

And the week before, I'm flying out both weeks. I called and said I had a problem with the page, mentioned price matching Opodo and got a normal fare.

corporate-wage-slave

The basis would be paying one particular fare on day1 and then the fare falls significantly a few days later due to something that can only be explained as a computer error. A customer would be able to present a variety of examples of this happening and would then use the Consumer Rights Act on the basis of balanced and fair contracts. Clearly if they were affected personally by TLV/DXB then they would be in a better space. The probable complication is that while seemingly these fares were unnecessarily high in isolation, I suspect in context they will be in the usual BA range, albeit at the top end. Unless it was something like a family group and the fare difference was over £100 each, I'm not sure it would be worth the candle. The obvious difference here is that whereas the passenger is free to buy or not buy a ticket, and presumably wouldn't buy something at a manifestly incorrect price, the nature of selling tickets, particularly via agents, means that airlines do end up selling things against their will and better judgement.

Woodbinerich

Thank you. The cards are very much stacked here, and as you say it's hard to see someone pursuing this in most cases. I can't see a customer service agent conceding anything on this on a call. It does strike me though that the more often the airline pulls the 'manifest error' card on dubious grounds the other way and the more unreliable the IT infrastructure is, the more they open themselves up to a challenge the other way. At the end of the day, airline pricing is highly elastic and often bears little or no relation to the underlying costs of providing the service, so I think it makes it somewhat harder for a customer to establish what a reasonable price is.