Etihad price error (Australia to Europe)

[aaa99]

Apparently, this happened yesterday.

Glitch sees return flights from Australia to Europe for less than $300

Australians secured return flights to Europe in summer for less than $300 on Thursday night after an apparent glitch from a booking agent and major airline.

www.dailymail.co.uk

Obviously, this was fixed in an hour and no longer works, but some have ended up with pretty cheap flights to Berlin. OzB comments suggest, the biz class prices booked during the glitch period were similar.

Will be interesting to see if it gets honoured.

 

[vodamerc]

Yep, I snagged a biz ticket Mel - Berlin for next Thursday. $150

 

[AIRwin]

Yep, I snagged a biz ticket Mel - Berlin for next Thursday. $150

Sehr gut!

 

[vodamerc]

Only downside is its EY into Brussels and then a short hop to Berlin. I'll be going on to London so it would have been nice to just catch something from Brussels. Not sure if I can get my luggage and just leave there.

 

[Thibault]

Only downside is its EY into Brussels and then a short hop to Berlin. I'll be going on to London so it would have been nice to just catch something from Brussels. Not sure if I can get my luggage and just leave there.

Usually, with EY they always check through the bags to the final destination. If it's the same flight I was looking at yesterday (albeit was too late to the party) - it has a 1.15h or 1.35h layover time in BRU so it might be hard to convince the ground crew at MEL.
Please report! Very lucky to have snatched this ticket!

 

[Danger]

Apparently, this happened yesterday.

Glitch sees return flights from Australia to Europe for less than $300

Australians secured return flights to Europe in summer for less than $300 on Thursday night after an apparent glitch from a booking agent and major airline.

www.dailymail.co.uk

Obviously, this was fixed in an hour and no longer works, but some have ended up with pretty cheap flights to Berlin. OzB comments suggest, the biz class prices booked during the glitch period were similar.

Will be interesting to see if it gets honoured.

Please don't call these types of discount fares an error (or a mistake).

 

[aaa99]

Oops , unlucky! Etihad Cancels Australia-Europe Tickets Mistakenly Sold For $200

 

[lovestotravel]

Oops , unlucky! Etihad Cancels Australia-Europe Tickets Mistakenly Sold For $200

Not surprising

 

[MEL_Traveller]

Please don't call these types of discount fares an error (or a mistake).

I think this is a matter of conjecture.

Whether a fare is a mistake or not is a factual issue. I cannot think of a case where an airline has released a ‘sale’ or heavily discounted fare, and then - due to sheer volume - has decided to back out by calling it a mistake.

Heavily discounted fares usually come with publicity. BA’s £777 return business class fares to Hong Kong on their new boeing 777 is an example. They didn’t attempt to back out of that.

In this case the correct price was shown on the booking page, but somehow on the payment page only the taxes were collected. There was no accompanying promotion saying ‘fares waived, just pay taxes’.

Some airlines will honour mistakes, others won’t. When something is as obvious as this case, I don’t think too much turns on the nomenclature? Conversely if the fare really does look genuine, I can’t think of an airline that’s backed out.

Post automatically merged: Oct 5, 2022

Not surprising

Reading OzBargain I think one person on there got to fly it! They booked and depart ed the very next day, before the airline had time to step in.

 

[aaa99]

Reading OzBargain I think one person on there got to fly it! They booked and depart ed the very next day, before the airline had time to step in.

Genuinely curious what happens on their return flight...

 

[MEL_Traveller]

Genuinely curious what happens on their return flight...

I’d be surprised if EY didn’t carry them home… although in which class would be the question. Can’t remember if they bought business class, which was also $300? If in economy, no issue. But if they bought higher they might get offered a lower cabin. Even if EU261 applied, the 75% downgrade penalty would be worth if for EY.

I haven’t read the etihad contract of carriage, but IIRC most of them have a clause allowing the airline to collect additional taxes at the airport in addition to any fare paid, presumably to cover any unforeseen increase in government levies (never seen this happen in reality).

They might cancel the return ticket claiming fraud… which although might be hard for them to prove, it could still leave the passenger stranded while they fight their case (or not). If they went down this avenue, claiming the tickets themselves weren’t valid (hard given they allowed travel outbound), EU261 probably wouldn’t apply as that requires valid tickets to have been issued.

 

[Happy Dude]

Please don't call these types of discount fares an error (or a mistake).

What should they be called? The proper fare didn't load, just the taxes. There was no discount intended. Sounds like a mistake/error to me?

 

[Happy Dude]

Here's the outrage/devastation, disingenuous IMO, from the bleeding hearts trying to guilt the airline for ruining their life:

https://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-advice/flights/gutted-outrage-after-336-european-flights-cancelled-days-later/news-story/1724486aa3921ed91f824476c683d153

 

[MEL_Traveller]

What should they be called? The proper fare didn't load, just the taxes. There was no discount intended. Sounds like a mistake/error to me?

IIRC the issue of what to call these fares stemmed from the infamous Swiss [Airlines] mistake fares from years ago ex Rangoon, where the Canadian courts ultimately considered the issue of mistake and whether the passenger ‘knew’ or ‘ought to have known’ the fare they were buying was a mistake.

The passengers in that have all sorts of examples of other fares that were close to, or equal to the Swiss fare, and claimed they couldn’t have know this was a mistake. IIRC the examples weren’t really comparing like for like, and some were even based on other mistake fares. The court didn’t agree with the passengers.

So it was decided on the likes of FT that fares should never be called a ‘mistake’, no matter how obvious, lest a court use that as evidence that people ‘knew’ or ‘ought to have known’.

It seems however that this questions is rarely relevant. If a fare is a mistake but not obvious, the airlines have never sought to back out. They only do so where the mistake is obvious. And so it is pretty hard for most passengers to feign ignorance.

The preference is to call these ‘bargain’ fares, or something similar.

For a $300 return business class fare to Europe I think it’s a bit of a non-issue. Even in economy the closest fare on scoot would have been almost double, excluding any bags or meals. Had the initial price been listed as $300 on Etihad maybe - just maybe - people could have thought EY was undercutting Scoot. But te full fare was actually listed initially, only to incorrectly show on the payment page.