IAN-UK

The Canadian authorities have come down on the side of seven individuals complaining against LX action in the Rangoon mistake fares fiasco:

http://www.cta-otc.gc.ca/eng/agency-...ion-passengers

divjan

^^ very impressive for 8 individuals to have accomplished this.....there is some justice I guess.....

it would be interesting to see how they will handle the future trips that have not commenced yet

weero

Nice!
Because they did not try this in CH or DE where the legal system is part of some corporate division.

oliver2002

The full ruling is here: http://www.otc-cta.gc.ca/eng/ruling/239-c-a-2013

f4freeJunior

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9900; de) AppleWebKit/534.11+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.1.0.714 Mobile Safari/534.11+)

I have already asked LX to reinstate my tickets.

behuman

Well done ! I suppose you, as well as all other clever people booked their tickets 100 % bona fide .

In this case also the Courts in Europe will protect you.

However should there be any "obviousness" in the fare mistake, LX might likely be able to invoke error in contracting and be able to retreat from the contract with an appropiate compensation having to be paid.

The whole Rangoon story is disgusting.

weero

A strong reason not to waste time and money on a European court, I'd say.

Jasper2009

I don´t necessarily disagree, but when the same mistake happens three times and each time the mistake remains unnoticed for an extended period of time, should an airline really be permitted to just play the "error fair - sorry, too bad" card?

ILS2

This was no mistake fare. Swiss forgot to pay attention to an announced currency devaluation, which meant that a price that was correct one day, was suddenly very cheap the next. SQ and other airlines that have some decency accepted that this was their own doing and let people fly, while Swiss went out of their way to make life hard for their passengers.

I have to admit that I quite enjoy that they seem to lose out here + ending up with a huge legal bill on top of that.

IAN-UK

So what exactly do you think a mistake fare is ?

SMK77

This is a tricky one: the fare was loaded and sold in local currency. The amount was the same all the time - and even after the FX devaluation, Swiss still got the amount they were asking the day before. Hence, there was no mistake at all other that Swiss would not get the same amount of money once they converted the sales price into USD or CHF. Not paying attention to changing FX rates is not an error but sloppiness and in no event the fault of the customer.

Tickets in South Africa are getting cheaper every day due to the declining South African Rand. Can the airline now claim an error fare if the ZAR declines further?

The way airlines are resolving the problem is by loading fares in USD instead of local currency.

NA-Flyer

shhhhhhhh

IAN-UK

Not so tricky at all. A mistake is an unintended consequence. This was a mistake, caused by carelessness.



Your argument is better employed against the less generic term of "technical error" which, I believe, is the wording used in the airline's conditions of carriage. The Canadians highlight the ambiguity introduced by the term.

Swiss was certainly careless in the oversight of fare information fed into the system by a third-party acting for the airline, but whether this represents a technical error is moot.

SMK77

There was no mistake either. The fare was sold for the same price the day before and did not change. There was no new upload, there was no change, there was no nothing.

The FX conversion changed, that's all.

IAN-UK

I'm baffled. If it wasn't a mistake, then you must believe it was intentional.


Mistake is a simple term recognising an unplanned outcome caused by miscalculation, lack of knowledge or carelessness.... etc. It's a long etcetera

Here it's not employed to exculpate the airline, simply to acknowledge that the outcome was not one sought by Swiss. It's a term routinely used on FT to indicate an irregular fare, one that is likely to be withdrawn when the airline wakes up to the situation.



I'd say that the case we are discussing was humdinger of a mistake, carelessness in the extreme, to allow a $5000+ fare to be sold for a few hundred dollars.

But you clearly think otherwise, so I'll withdraw from the discussion before it becomes tedious for others.