Please do use HK slang here, I have picked up quite a few phrases thanks to their English rendition on Flyertalk.

Only a matter of time before it turned up in the SCMP:

Cathay Pacific sells first and business class tickets to North America for economy prices in apparent error – but will airline honour deal?

As it should @dgittings.

@MoDs: This is not only a cross post, but also a sure fire way to exacerbate airline response.

Not necessarily in the U.S. In the more recent instances, DOT has ruled that the fare can be refunded at the airline's option. On a strict U.S. common law contract theory, it's an obvious unilateral mistake and voidable, seems to me.

will it cause just a refund rather than allow the affected ones to travel? I am waiting for F on these flights:
19/4: CX872
29/4: CX883

CX only has 6 F seats per flight, and not all flights.
Given the publicity on many blogs, one could assume that they sold several hundred F tickets.
If they honor the error fares, good luck for finding A fares in the coming months. Or good luck for changing your flights if you bought an A fare at high non-error prices. Or good luck for getting an F award to US.

I'm speculating that the number of F tickets sold is well over thousand. EF shows F0 for ~80% of HKG-YVR flights through the EOS, occasional F1 and very rare F2. Once you add BOS, JFK and SFO - its 1-2 thousand at least

Bloggers deliberately use expressions like "mistake fare" or "bug" even when they don't really know what constitutes a mistake or how to evaluate that because it drives traffic from search engines. Any kind of good sale is now labelled a "mistake fare".

The fare in question (AAARRVN8) was not bookable in F class, only in A class. It seems to me CX simply pulled as much inventory as possible. Presumably they will repair this once they've had a chance to evaluate the total number of seats sold under this fare.

If we actually buy cash F tickets, or use Asia Miles for F upgrades, are we screwed?
 

If thousands of these tickets were indeed sold, am I correct in assuming F inventory for actual cash passengers and Asia Miles upgrades from J are going to be seriously impacted?

I use all of the above for me and Mrs QRC: A fares, companion awards accompanying A fare (occasionally F fare), J-F Asia Miles upgrades from J class, and in the last two years: Diamond upgrade certs to A class inventory.

Does anyone on here know how many tickets were impacted by this? If thousands, and North America only (where I predominantly fly CX F to), back of the envelope math would say we're impacted. If 10k tickets or more, those of us who actually buy A fares regularly / use Asia Miles / Diamond certs are pretty screwed. Ugh.

My maths
10x routes = 20x sectors daily to/from North America
X 6 seats per flight = 120x F class seats daily to/from North America
= 44k seats annually

So 2.5k tickets sold means about 5% of the annual F inventory to/from N. America was just swiped by these people. 15k tickets would be 30% of F inventory.

And I can only imagine that A fare could be impacted by as much as 50-75%>


If a few hundred seats were impacted, it seems like CX could afford to honor and live with their mistake. But if we're talking about thousands of seats, I seriously hope they cancel these tickets. Otherwise it seems there will be a serious impact for the rest of us who actually pay for these tickets normally.

Yes; a shortage of supply will increase the equilibrium price. But the supply restriction is only limited to CX metal. Many of CX's passengers would be quite happy to travel on other carriers. So, it is a balance for CX to push up the average price of their product without losing so many passengers that the net revenue falls.

The problem for any airline is that there are only so many passengers who will tolerate the price of full F tickets. If CX tries to make up the loss by closing even more A inventory and forcing F pricing, they cannot invent new passengers willing to tolerate F prices.

Therefore, if CX decided to go ahead with these sold tickets, there is a big squeeze on the A inventory, but it doesn't help CX to make the squeeze artificially tighter. That will just result in empty seats.

Non-revenue products such as upgrade awards or the like and award redemption space is likely to be the first to be cut.

The word from one of the Cathay staff WhatsApp groups that I'm privy to (and that should be taken with a healthy pinch of salt!) is that about 50% of the entire First Class inventory for 2019 HK-US flights was sold last night.