SINGAPORE: Some travellers managed to snap up ANA business class tickets on Tuesday (Apr 18) for a fraction of the typical price due to a currency conversion glitch.
The pricing error occurred on the Japanese airline’s Vietnam website and it took half a day before the mistake was rectified.
Bloomberg reported that most of the heavily discounted round-trip tickets listed Jakarta as the point of departure with a stopover in Tokyo before arriving at several locations in North America and the Caribbean.
They were purchased for a mere few hundred dollars – a steal compared to the usual US$10,000 price for a business class seat.
“I never thought I’d catch such a deal,” customer Johnny Wong told Bloomberg after booking a return business class flight from Jakarta to Honolulu, Hawaii for just US$550.
Another customer, Herman Yip, swept up 25 business class tickets from Jakarta to Aruba for only US$17,000.
ANA has since said it will make a decision by the end of April as to whether it will honour the ticket price.
But travel experts CNA spoke to said that the bargain hunters should not hold out hope, and that the joy may be short-lived as airlines like ANA reserve the right to cancel the tickets.
Q: Are airlines obligated to honour fares sold cheaply by mistake?
Many airlines refer to the conditions of carriage which allow them to unilaterally cancel tickets when an incorrect ticket price has been charged.
If the airline comes out quickly to address the erroneous fares and cancel the issued tickets, it would then be disingenuous for those who buy them to pretend they are innocent customers who got hoodwinked, said Mr Aaron Wong, the founder of travel website The MileLion.
However, if the airline remains silent for a prolonged period, or does not address the matter at all, then it is reasonable for consumers to assume the airline intends to honour the tickets as sold and start making plans around the tickets.
The founder of Suitesmile, a “travel hacking” and miles blog, also said that airlines are not obligated to honour erroneous fares.
Many variables can influence this decision, such as the extent of financial damage suffered by the airline, said Mr Fairuz Sallim. Airlines must also consider the amount of manual work required to check the total number of bookings with error fares and process refunds, if any.