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Comment by giarc | Hacker News Reader

I was involved in a recent airline mistake situation. AirCanada accidentally listed an $8000 flight pass for $800. People are complaining that AirCanada is not honouring these passes and there's even a class action lawsuit starting up. I wonder though for those people that get heavily involved, will this mean years of getting "randomly" bumped from flights? Will AirCanada 'punish' these people?

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In the UK at least, they can "get away with" (i.e., there's nothing to get away with, it's totally legal) correcting a mistake like that.

I can't remember exactly what it's called - I assume it has to be an "obvious" error.

Honest errors are allowed for - there's quite often cases of online systems giving silly prices and the company isn't obliged to honour the price. Sometimes you see E&OE [errors and omissions expected] on adverts to draw attention to the fact that they might have erred and won't honour an erroneous deal.

Sometimes companies honour the error for PR reasons, there was a John Lewis situation I think where they did this recently.

Advertised prices are "invitations to treat" rather than binding contracts of sale.

"Advertised prices are 'invitations to treat' rather than binding contracts of sale."

Ah - precisely - I'm so glad you brought that up. If only more people understood this simple principle!

You're right though, frequently honoured for good PR - it's rare that an item going through checkout at the 'wrong' price perhaps due to an expired offer is not adjusted.

In the US, at least for the last few years, the same legal principal that allowed airline to get away with correcting those mistakes was secondary to Department of Transportation Regulation CFR 399.88a

This prevented, explicitly including the case of "mistake" fares, the post-purchase increase in the price of airfare. This was done to prevent airlines from post-facto declaring a promotion a "mistake" when deemed "too successful" later.

That's true. Here is an article that goes into the topic in some depth: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/money-sav...

I highly doubt it. Why would they take the risk in giving themselves a worse reputation? What would they stand to gain financially anyway? It's interesting that we seem to naturally assume that the business reaction would be congruent with what might be the reaction at the human level.

Interesting - homo economicus might well be companies not people...

I would agree, but that's assuming everyone in the company is acting on behalf of and with the intentions of the company. I think there are plenty of examples where a company representative acts in a manner that is completely against what the company would want (see corporate Twitter accounts).

Fair enough, and in other cases I could see this as being an issue (particularly with smaller businesses perhaps where employees may identify more strongly with their company and its success), but in this case I just don't see it happening. As I said it doesn't really make sense at a company level, and on a personal level who would be the one motivated to punish these customers in such a way? It seems the onus would be on some individual(s) in the ticketing system to "Hey, that's one of those jerks from that lawsuit! I'll teach them to cause trouble with my company." That just doesn't seem likely to me.

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