U.S. warns airlines on fare mistakes

Airlines are among the few businesses that sometimes want customers to pay for their mistakes. Every once in a while, a carrier cancels issued tickets after it deems its own published fare was an "error." The Department of Transportation tried to teach such companies a lesson last week - sort of.
The DOT's Wednesday ruling was directed at British Airways. Last month, it published an unusually low fare from the United States to India. The base was $40 round trip, though British doesn't include its $370 fuel surcharge in that amount and, unlike most airlines, passes it on as a "tax" rather than as part of the ticket price. The actual taxes were an additional $150, with slight variations depending on the actual city pairs.
While $560 is several hundred dollars less than a regular advance-purchase fare to India, airlines have been offering unprecedented promotions in the past year to attract more passengers. In addition, that fare didn't seem an obvious mistake like the Swiss $300 business-class price from Canada to Europe and India, with a $0 base, about which I wrote in January.
The British fare stayed on the market only a day, but that was enough time for hundreds of tickets to be purchased. Three days later, the airline decided that a mistake had been made and unilaterally canceled all those tickets.
Many of the affected customers were seasoned travelers who know how to play the frequent-flier game, so they decided to put up a fight. After their pleas were rejected by the carrier, they turned to DOT. Some of them said they had made nonrefundable hotel and car-rental reservations and even had bought other plane tickets in conjunction with what they had thought would be their main trip.
DOT said it "conducted a full investigation over the cause, magnitude and consequences of this incident" and determined that "British Airways' unilateral cancellation of all the reservations" made on Oct. 2 "has caused financial harm to a large number of consumers."
However, the department's refusal to force British Airways to restore the canceled tickets was a big disappointment to many customers.
British Airways "sincerely" apologized to customers for the "inconvenience" and offered them a $300 discount on new tickets to India, but it imposed strict rules. The travelers' names must match those on the canceled bookings, they must make the new purchases by Thursday and complete their trips by Sept. 30, 2010.
30/11/09 Nicholas Kralev ON THE FLY/Washington Times, USA

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Categories: Foreign Nov 2009