frobozzelectric

are those ridiculously cheap fares we sometimes refer to as "error" fares really caused by human or IT errors or are they planted "easter eggs", calculated and put in place by actuarians to keep us excited and in the game?


5J, a lcc based in .ph, occasionaly announce a 1 peso fare promo though i have been able to book some P1.00 flights even while supposedly no promos were in effect.

either way i am happy for everyone who do get these inexpensive fares but i doubt it is because of an error.

RandomNobody

The 1 peso fares (plus taxes and fees) are real on Cebu Pacific.

Scuttlebut is that they don't really expect most to actually show up for the flight, at least the international ones. They're instantly gobbled up by ex-pats to use as "throw-away" tickets.

frobozzelectric

not an expat but yeah i tell my agent to just get me as many as he can find.

with taxes and fees its still less than $20 per way on most intl routes.

sbm12

Some are real. Some are errors. I'm quite certain that *A didn't really want to sell a bunch of ~700 euro r/t biz seats this week, for example. In other cases the goal is simply filling planes, brand/name awareness or making up some of the loss on ancillary sales associated with the ticket.

frobozzelectric

i see somebody scored some sweet sweet deals. you're good at hunting them down.

pinniped

In 2017, I don't believe there are any error fares. I suppose someone might be able to find an example of a bug in a workflow somewhere that has never been seen before and was exposed through some new (in 2017) technology, but I suspect those are extremely rare.

Basically, these unusually low fares fall into two categories:

(1) They are unintentionally loaded, but via a process that the airline is already aware of and has consciously chosen to leave as-is, knowing that occasionally a suboptimal (to them) fare will get loaded. There are certainly fixes out there that could prevent "too low" fares from ever reaching the public, but the airlines have chosen not to implement them. The impact to their existing processes would be too costly. (It's plausible that too-high fares get unintentionally loaded too, but we don't pay attention to them.)

(2) They are put there on purpose for marketing reasons. Spirit likes their negative fares. Lots of airlines like their 1 dollar/peso/euro/etc fares. There are also theories that airlines use certain fares to signal each other, but that might be straying a bit far into conspiracy theory territory...

In any case, I have no sympathy when an airline claims an error and tries to revoke tickets. They know their processes. The first time they had an "error" fare, they sat in a room and talked about what it would take to prevent the error in the future. They then decided to take the risk and not fix the problem. I completely understand this - at my own company, we have this kind of discussion with every software bug report or process issue we come across. Sometimes we acknowledge a flaw exists and decide not to fix it, but then we own the consequences of it being there.