I'm a complete moron (possibly)- date mistake in ticketing
 

So here's the deal:

Booked on FL a few weeks ago for a flight departing 11/15/09, returning 11/16/09. Was on FL website yesterday checking my account and to my (slight) horror, I see that the flights were showing as a past itinerary on 11/1/09, returning 11/2/09.

I find it incredibly hard to believe I booked the flights on the wrong days as I'm fairly anal about checking and re-checking all aspects of every flight I book.

2 questions:

1. Is there any possible way this was a website/software glitch that resulted in the wrong dates for the flights?

2. Does it even pay to see if FL will do anything to accommodate me in any manner?

What does your receipt say? I recently booked a return flight on the wrong day - in my case I had multiple browsers open and selected the wrong itin to book (well.. that's the theory anyway.. :D)

Assuming they sent you an email confirmation, what does that say?

Confirmation also says 11/1 and 11/2, but I didn't look at the confirmation until yesterday when I noticed the issue on my FL account.

I'm assuming I'm screwed, but just wondered if anyone had any advice or anything similar that happened to them.

You've got nothing to lose by telling them what happened and begging for mercy.

I've had both the AA and UA websites change dates when I've been researching fares, so it is certainly possible for that to happen. In one of these cases, I actually sent it to be ticketed and noticed the mistake (return date was a week off) when I received e-mail confirmation of the purchase (stage before ticketing). A quick call to AA and they were able to void the transaction and I submitted a new one with the correct dates.

It's just one of those things you have to pay careful attention to, particularly in verifying all the information once you do receive confirmation.

This reminds me of a mistake I made with online booking on WN once..I meant to book PHX-TUL on Oct 15, and OKC-PHX on Oct 20..but ended up booking BOTH flights on OCT 15, the OKC-PHX one hours before the PHX-TUL one. My mouse finger must have slipped! This seems to be a common error with online interfaces...this, and the pop up calendar we forget to move into the next month if the 1st occours between departure and arrival.

Sometimes if you have been setting the dates and use the scroll wheel without first clicking elsewhere on the page, it will scroll the dates. I got caught with this once on booking a flight with BD. They were not interested in changing and simply said that I had all the details on the confirmation screen and clicked Proceed.

You would be surprised the number of letters that airlines get from people who accidently booked the wrong date and then want the airline to compensate them for the inconvenience.

Which then suggests that the problem is with the system rather than the customer. I imagine airlines know this is an issue but choose not to fix it because it is a useful source of income.

None of the dates on the reservation/booking I ever made was "pre-assigned" by the system/s. The dates are always picked/chosen by customers.

Can you elaborate how the airlines/systems are at fault when customers book the wrong dates themselves? :confused:

The purpose (supposedly) of the online booking system is to sell pax tickets for air travel on the dates they want to fly. If pax often end up using the system and booking flights on the wrong dates then the system is not delivering what it sets out to do. In most industries, the aim is to achieve customer satisfaction and selling the wrong product seldom achieves that. But in the aviation industry, we seem to have been conditioned to believe that errors are the fault of the passenger and therefore the airline should not try to remedy the situation. Given the known fault that scroll wheels can cause dates, destinations and other data held in drop-down lists to be altered after the customer thinks the data has been set then airlines could take steps to fix the situation. The fact that they don't suggests they prefer to have errors occurring and keep the money.

I've made this mistake myself, and its a price you have to pay to have the convenience of being able to book your own tickets. There are several confirmations you make before you pay, so you likely would have been able to catch it previously. I've also had people get confused on tickets that are departing just after midnight on flights, and miss their flight, thinking it departs the following night, and the airlines still generally make you pay. Its a lose-lose situation! I have also had itineraries get messed up by having multiple windows open for the same website while researching fares and have the date incorrectly get booked because of that, realizing moments later when the confirmation email arrived. They checked their database and sent me the log of my transaction and showed me that I had in fact chosen those dates, and made me pay the change fee. If you truly believe there was a technical error, you can contact the airline and they will be able to have their tech support/web team look at the transaction for you and see if it was in fact their error. Most likely, it was yours and you'll just have to pay unfortunately!

Every single booking system I have used shows a final confirmation screen where you can review all the info regarding what you are about to buy

Problem is, (dumb) computer users are known to click the 'ok' button blindly.......as in

"do you really want to install this virus?"
"would you like to meet single coeds by installing this safe and free application that is going to eat all the resources of your computer and use it as a spam sender?"
"your computer is going to blow up, click 'yes KILL ME!' to do it now, click 'kill me later when I sleep!' to do it when the computer is shutdown.....click 'cancel' to 'cancel and PREVENT DEATH"

in summary, no matter how well designed any system is ......there will always be screws ups and this is even more so when you have 'everyone' using it (as in , everyone that "THINKS" they can use a computer)

The difference in date formats used around the World doesn't help either but reality is that 'do it yourself' booking systems are used all the time and the % of mistakes is VERY small

(I fly few airlines......and at least for the ones I use ....you can always TOTALLY CANCEL a purchase if you do it within 24 hours of booking so even if you screw it up THEN fail to notice this at the final confirmation screen you can STILL look at your receipt and take corrective action)

Interesting argument. I would counter to say that whereas it is possible to put in place many multiple layers of redundant checks, eventually the inconvenience, costs and lost productivity from these layers of redundancies will outweight the potential benefits they might provide.

Would passengers prefer to be asked to re-check their travel dates twice before they can complete a booking? Three times? Four? Eight? Twenty-six?

Would a passenger be willing to pay an extra $X so that the airline can call him on the morning of departure to remind him that he is supposed to fly today?

I would instead venture to say that passengers in some parts of the world are so conditioned in a compensation mentality that they are unwilling to assume responsibility for their own errors.