United Airlines: A first-class cock up

If the bookings were on United's website (it doesn't say exactly) then they should be liable regardless of how it got that way. If the bookings were on another website then the DOT will likely agree with United. Having worked for a large travel OTA, the rules for the taker of money are different than for a third party who only collects the data but not the money.

> an OBVIOUS pricing error

How does the average person know when something is an obvious error? Pilots and other airline personnel often fly standby at ridiculously cheap rates. Sometimes airlines fly planes almost completely empty: http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/13/travel/man-alone-delta-flight-...

It seems plausible that United could offer extreme discounts for some unknown reason.

> customers are often held to a different standard

Are they really? Do we have a lot of data on what happens when customers make booking mistakes that the airline should objectively have realised is a mistake?

The closest thing I have to a datapoint is that my company once booked me on a flight on a fare that should have cost ~£800 but was quoted and paid >£3k (I flagged it but the travel office didn't seem to care and I certainly had better things to do with my time). I was upgraded to business class on check in, that's never happened before or since, and I travel quite a lot.

The problem is that the line where the "obvious" starts is not so obvious.

For example, in Mexico there's a law that basically states that a price published is a valid price and as a seller you have to honor that price regardless of how low or absurd it might be. There has been several cases where this has been upheld where you could argue that it was "obvious", e.g., a TV (recent model) sold for like $4 USD.

However I believe it is way easier to just establish a "simple" law such as that one, than trying to define what obvious means and what doesn't.

I also remember someone explaining me (not sure if this was the real reason or not, but sounds sensible), that it was also to protect from bait and switch scams, where a seller would say such-and-such items sold at X price, really cheap so people would come, and then saying, oh no, it's just an error, it's actually 5X the price. And so the consumer is protected, or at least that's the idea.

Regarding fairness over customer mistakes, I experienced one recently that impressed me greatly (albeit unrelated to airlines). I bought a house two years ago and recently discovered that I never cancelled my insurance for the condo that I sold shortly afterwards. The house insurance was rolled into my mortgage whereas the condo insurance was deducted from my bank account, so I didn't notice the double payment for a long time because they weren't in the same place.

When I called to cancel the condo insurance, they offered, without any prompting on my part, to refund all of the excess premium payments after the sale, even though it was nearly two years ago at this point.

Many companies will actually make good on an honest mistake like this.

Edit: another example just occurred to me. There are frequent stories about people running up bills on Amazon Web Services (and sometimes other cloud providers) by accident, typically because their servers got compromised or their credentials leaked. The provider typically credits the excess.

Airlines (maybe not UA) often sell super cheap tickets (spirit, southwest, ryanair) so its not like its not without precedent - so while its likely people knew it was an error, they have some cover, I mean how would you know conclusively its not?

Airlines are hoist on their own petard in this case. Given the complexity of airline fare pricing, nothing is obvious. Nothing.

I would not be surprised in the least if they charged left-handed customers 1% more than right-handed customers.

If Wal-Mart sold a $300 television set for $3, I could see a case for OBVIOUS pricing error. Wal-Mart has a consistent pricing policy, wherein the price is the same for anyone who walks into the store, and clearly printed on the shelf label.

Not so for airlines. A typical airline flight could have dozens of fare classes, and any given seat on it could be mapped to multiple fare classes. If someone buys a "K" fare, they get seat 14B. Now if someone tries to get a "Q" fare with their loyalty points, the flight is sold out, because "Q" fares are only good for row 14 on that flight. Later, the "K" fare cancels for only a partial refund, and someone pays quadruple the price for a "G" fare and gets exactly the same seat, but their fare is fully refundable. If you walked onto the plane and pointed at seat 14B, and asked airline personnel how much it would cost to sit there for that flight, not a single one of them could tell you. It doesn't work that way.

So if they made a "mistake", then too fucking bad. Honor the fare you sold, you bastards, because our patience with your price discrimination games was already at an end 10 years ago.

That's pretty damn shady if true.

Also likely illegal in Europe at least. There have been cases of prices magically increasing as items are moved to the cart/checkout, and companies have been fined (see EasyJet for one example).

> Airlines make less than a dollar per traveler per flight correct?

No, that is wrong. Very wrong.

United: $1.13 Billion Profit 2014

The so-called ancillary revenue alone — fees for everything from checking a bag to more legroom — amounts to more than $22 per passenger.

For a first class ticket?

When the cable or water company does it to me (overcharging on a bill), it takes months to get solved, and they make you feel like you're trying to rip them off, so, no - it has to go both ways or none.

(Cue me last year walking into a Comcast office with my lawyer in tow to discuss them charging me a modem rental fee whereas I have my own modem - in truth, we just were in the neighborhood)

Call it ripping off a company when they stop practicing price discrimination based on country of purchase (not origin of flight.)