amartin1979

It appears this is exactly what United.com did yesterday. I was unable to ticket any of these on united.com, but it told me there was a fare pricing error. So one of the airline websites was smart enough to figure it out, and it wasnt AA.com

cedric

Well, $50 wouldn't work given that GoFares start from $29. After taxes, that equals $39. Seeing that my LEB-LAX flight costed $39 after taxes/fees, it would be kind of difficult to implement such a measure while allowing legitimate prices to show.

windwalker

I looked, can't be done on-line, Once booked(that's just assanine)

Question
How do I select / change my seat assignment?


Answer
When booking a reservation online, customers may select their seat assignments. Once a reservation has been booked online, system limitations prevent customers from changing their seat assignment or making a seat assignment if they did not do so when they booked.

If you need to make or change a seat assignement on a reservation booked online, call our Automated Customer Service Line at 1-800-943-5436. You may also check flight departure and arrival times and reconfirm a reservation at this number.

whlinder

Not everyone will listen. That way they can justify why they bought all those fares and don't feel bad bleeding an already bankrupt airline of more cash. People still think stuff like the BA $20 deal was on purpose.


They do. They have to look at the warning file that lists those extremely low priced tickets. If they don't look, the error isn't noticed. As for the $50 barrier, think how many one-way tickets sell below $50. It is also tough to make a blanket prohibition of selling tickets below X amount, when airlines have buy one get one free sales, and the free ticket is 0.00 base fare.

Miami_Flyer

[QUOTE=whlinder]Not everyone will listen. That way they can justify why they bought all those fares and don't feel bad bleeding an already bankrupt airline of more cash. People still think stuff like the BA $20 deal was on purpose.


Sometime ago I read a MR post in which the $113 JFK-LIM tickets were cancelled AFTER ticketing by Copa. Why isn't US doing the same?

sbtinme

Too many collateral issues. It wasn't just mileage runners buying these fares yesterday. Some of it was entirely legit. For example, a couple have been wanting to go to Vegas for a few years now, so they get up on Saturday morning and do some poking around on the web. They stumble across a GREAT DEAL on travelocity.com to Vegas from Lebanon, NH -- the airport they normally fly out of since they live in White River Junction, VT.

Looked like USAir (and some United flights) were offering a ridiculously low fare that ended up about $40 p/p after fees and taxes. Great! Now, they went ahead and secured everything else for their trip. Let's see, 5 nights at the Aladdin Hotel on a web only non-refundable rate of $129/nt. Fantastic! And, then let's get some good seats for the Celine Concert --- gosh, a crazy $185 for the night we're there .... but, what the hay!
.........

So, now imagine US coming along 36 hours later and contacting these pax to tell them the price was wrong on their tickets and sorry for the confusion. What do they do about the nearly $900 they've already committed to other (non refundable) activities based on their purchased and confirmed ticket on US?

What about the biz traveller who needed to fly to LAX and then connect to the Thai flight (*A) that leaves that afternoon. He logged on to book a flight in domestic F from Watertown to the left coast and snagged a crazy deal. If US cancels now, it could cost him more than it would've Saturday morning.

What about the couple who booked a trip to SAN and already committed themselves to a time share week there? Too late to back out for them .....


ETC ETC ETC The whole mess just gets entirely too hairy to deal with. A significant percentage of the affected consumers would be livid and have a thousand stories to tell about how US's renigging cost them millions of dollars in lost deposits, etc.

channa

Power of numbers. How many people got in on the Copa deal? Like 6?

It's a simple risk analysis. Copa figured that by cancelling 6 tix, there would be little or no fallout: no press coverage, no lawsuits, no reliance issues (e.g., the pre-paid hotel booking or concert tickets example above). Copa was right.

US, however, probably sold 1,000 tickets here. A few people are bound to be upset if they get cancelled, not to mention the other kinds of liabilities it would expose US to. The airline is bankrupt as it is, and there's already a "book away" factor becaues people are scared, so having their name in a headline about voiding tickets would not do them any good.

Alysia

I had dinner over at a friend's house tonight. This friend works at DOT in one of the airline regulating offices. I went against my own rule of keeping this from anyone not on FT & proceeded to explain about the tickets. She said to let her know if they don't honor the tickets so that DOT could get involved.

RoyalFlush

.....

dingo

Ah, thank goodness! The federal government will surely save this failing airline by forcing the honoring of a contract that no court in the land would uphold. And here I was thinking DOT was part of the problem...silly me!

whlinder

IIRC some people who bought tickets from COPA and were told they would not be honored went to the DOT and the DOT agreed that the fare was an 'obvious' error and that COPA didn't do anything wrong.

channa

How do we know "no court in the land would uphold" this?

Using the Amazon internet price goof precedent, upon charging of the credit card, the deal has commenced. Amazon didn't charge or ship the items in question. In our case, credit cards were charged and tickets were issued. It's done.

While CA law doesn't apply here, state consumer pricing law requires that posted pricing be honored. Typographical errors in an advertisement can be corrected and noted at the point of sale, but if a price is displayed or posted at the point of sale, it must be honored.

I'm fairly confident that a small claims court in California would probably uphold an issued ticket that was charged to a customer, if it ever got to that stage...

channa

I think there was some casual phone calls and emails about it, but never any sort of hearing or formal complaint filed.

Big difference, we're talking one person's opinion because he got a couple of phone calls.

jetsetter

Did anyone see this on the news? Besides us di hards, who really even knows this happened? We live in an obscure world that is very foreign to 99% of the population . Probably 98% of the population has no idea even what a mileage run is, or may not get it right until third guess or 5th.

This only affects a niche, and particularly since the flights originated in very small markets with BE1900's, and the condition was only in place for less than 24 hours.

ClueByFour

Anybody with a "dream map" kind of alert was hit. Anybody in any of the originating markets (HHH, JST, ART, LEB, AVL) would have known, because if they are tracking any fares, there are various GDS products that will ping you when a fare you are looking at drops.

I found out about it in the latter fashion, having been looking for a few fares ex-AVL. Of course, that I read that e-mail and opened FT 5 minutes later....

Additionally, there is the word of mouth factor, which is exacerbated by the internet. If one of every 3 FT folks who booked called a friend, and that friend called a friend, and so forth.

But forget that--many of these flights were not the $2 coach variety, they were like the $35 F variety, often booked at codeshares on UA metal. I somehow doubt that the real monetary value of those is insignificant, given that one or two seats sold can be the breakeven factor on a mainline flight...