CNN
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Last Thursday, for a limited time, Qantas offered round-trip first-class tickets from Australia to the United States, which normally cost up to 28,000 Australian dollars (about 19,000 US dollars), at a whopping 85 percent discount.
Due to a coding error, about 300 lucky people were able to purchase them on the airline’s website for just $3,400 a piece before the error was corrected.
“Unfortunately, this is a case where the fare was actually too good to be true,” Qantas said in a statement on Thursday.
However, all hope is not lost. Instead of cancelling the tickets, Qantas announced that it would rebook customers into Business Class at no additional cost “as a gesture of goodwill”. Alternatively, passengers who are not satisfied with Business Class can receive a full refund.
A Qantas business class flight between Australia and the United States typically costs around $11,000.
Qantas’ goodwill gesture followed a similar mistake that the airline handled differently last year.
Last August, Australian regulators filed a lawsuit accusing Qantas of selling tickets for more than 8,000 flights that the airline had already canceled – affecting more than 86,000 passengers.
In May, Qantas agreed to pay nearly $80 million to settle the lawsuit, with more than $13 million of that amount being awarded to affected customers.
Its CEO Vanessa Hudson told CNN in June that the company had “let down our customers and our employees.”
Airlines regularly make mistakes by selling premium tickets at blatantly incorrect prices, although some have chosen to accept these prices.
In 2019, Cathay Pacific offered first and business class seats from Vietnam to North American cities for just $675 round-trip.
Hong Kong’s national airline complied with the agreement and tweeted #promisemadepromisekept and #lessonlearnt on its X account.
But that’s not always the case. In 2010, American Airlines refused to honor round-trip first-class tickets from the U.S. to Australia worth up to $20,000 that it had sold at the economy-class price of $1,100. Instead, it offered $200 vouchers as compensation.
A year earlier, British Airways had also mistakenly not honored flights from North America to India worth $40 and instead offered vouchers worth $300.
