In March of this year, American published a ~$450 roundtrip business class fare between Washington and Beijing. American honored the fare for those who had ticketed their reservations, which they had to do given the DOT regulations at the time regarding post-purchase price increases. While most of us were thrilled with American honoring the fares,…
Continue reading: What We Can Learn From The DOT’s Ruling On Mistake Fares
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While American tried to use social media mentions against consumers, I don't see anything in the order to suggest that the DOT found that persuasive.
Am I the only one who thinks DOT ruled in AAs favor by approving such lame settlement? There's a world of difference between a cheap J ticket and a cheap Y ticket!
In my case I actually believe booked a ticket ex-Houston so the price was $1100 or so which isn't that obvious of a price mistake.
Ben,
I think you should also be careful when posting articles about mistake fares before they are corrected, because American might start going after people who publish these "in bad faith"...
My 2 cents of legal advice.
So, Ben, what are you going to be doing differently based upon the fact that, as you agreed, "Social media matters, and can be used against consumers."?
@Alex, there is a simple work around for this. Don't call it a "mistake fare". Call it a "sale fare". Treat it as you would any other sale fare and add the caveat that it won't be around long.
Michael
The numbers are really interesting! And I'm willing to bet this doesn't account for people like me (and my two companions) who purchased $850 biz class fares to Beijing (SFO-HND-PEK) on JAL through AA.com during this mistake fare. We couldn't have been the only ones!
Interesting that Lucky's initial post only described this as an AMAZING DEAL with no use of the word "mistake," though the last quote above (“Just noticed that the base fare was $0. Damn!!! Will still try.”) was a comment on said post.
Still absurd that AA tries to use that as defense...at least they honored those who ticketed!
So if you happened to find this mistake on your own and you don't happen to have a Twitter account, you're supposed to know there's blogs out there saying there's a mistake fare? Let's be honest, we all knew that it was, but my point is that American's defense is lame at best. They still broke the law and cancelled tickets because they could, and they got away with it.
My only takeaway from this ruling is that this country is really run by corporations, not the DOT or any other government agency. When it comes down to it, corporations will do what they want to do, and if they can't, they'll lobby and pay government officials off to rewrite the law to say that it is legal.
Rules are rules. American Airlines ignored the rules; no matter how justified they felt, they can't just ignore DOT's rules.
I've thought often that we should remove the term mistake fare from our lexicon. Call it an amazing fare or something. There is no need to try to read into the minds of an airline The fare is the fare. Their treatment of the guaranteed hold is also irksome. If the airline can arbitrarily cancel holds in the guaranteed period then there is no way it can be called a guaranteed hold and is significantly weaker than a post booking cancellation policy...
Think of it this way: you go to Best Buy, and a 60" LCD TV is marketed for, let's say, $1000. You go to purchase it, and it pops up as $250. Do you pay $250 or $1000? Now, consider the situation where it's marketed at $250, and you go to pay, where it rings up at $1000. The situation here is neither of those: it's like marketing a TV for $250, selling it for $250, and then saying, "Actually, it's worth $1000," and trying to get back all the TVs you sold at $250. I think we all see how ridiculous that is. It's not the fault of the consumer for purchasing an advertised fare.
Bobert: If it was fair or made sense, it wouldn't come from the DOT.
/still waiting for DOT to get rid of it's 1960s-era technology requirements on cars...
Even if we change our lexicon, what's to stop airlines from creating social media accounts to create damning posts to grease the DOT the next time around?
Although there are tweets about the mistake fare, AA can't prove that an individual purchases the ticket because of social media. Okay, maybe most of them do, but some of them can still stumble upon it. I don't get why when we purchase a non-refundable fare by mistake, we don't get to say, oops, let's cancel that, but big corporations can always find their way around whatever non-profitable situation they are in.
My thought is don't publicize these things and keep it to yourself. For example, there's a MAJOR loophole with a certain credit cards benefit that allows you to get double the benefit. Why share that that a public blog? Next thing I know, its on Flyer Talk and the mistake disappears.
The hypocrisy of the airlines is just mind numbing. Let's put this in perspective; what would happen if the poor customer makes a mistake in the departure date and realizes it 24.1 hours after purchasing the ticket, a 200.00 dollar change. What would happen if someone checks a bag and it weighs 51 pounds and does not have somewhere to put the excess, 75.00 dollars excess weight charge. Those are just two examples of mistakes, if the customer makes a mistake, the customer pays. It is only fair that if the airline makes a mistake, the airline also pays.