For the most part, the filing of airfare is completely automated nowadays and the airlines have gotten many of the kinks out of their systems that caused them periodic heartburn in years gone by. Millions of airfare can and do change each day (we see this each and every day) and one would think this volume would be ripe for a ton of mistakes like the $33 business class airfare on Alitalia, from Toronto to Larnaca, Cyprus last year - but that isn’t really the case. Many times $0 airfare isn’t necessarily a mistake — not in Europe, where airlines like Ryanair and EzJet periodically offer ridiculous numbers of “free” tickets (you have buy early, pack very light and not be overly hungry to get the best deal) –or in the U.S., where Skybus and Spirit Airlines regularly get great press on their sub $10 airfare. So, in the spirit of holiday fun, I thought it would be enlightening to review some mistakes we found (along with our alert users) this year:

Some Background First

Airfare mistakes can and do happen at a variety of touch points in the airfare filing and purchasing ecosystem:

• Actual Filed Airfare by an Airline can have mistakes
• Airline Web Sites that quote the prices can have bugs that foster mistakes (Air Canada had a “little” change to the new year bug a few years ago that had people jumping on “free” airfare)
• Online Travel Agencies — who many times have their own price quoting software that at times have had glitches that generated some whopper mistakes
• Global Distribution Systems who power travel agents and many websites also have their own quoting and pricing software that can be prone to an error or two periodically

Before the proliferation of the internet and the “instant” communication age, mistakes would normally just fall off into obscurity - this is no longer the case - when they happen (and they do happen) the news spreads like wildfire.

The shear volume of air travel flight pricing quotes means that there is a much greater possibility of finding these obscure mistakes. In the last 10 years the shift from “mostly” travel agent bookings to more recently over 60+ percent of air travel being booked online makes it much more likely that a “normal joe” instead of a “travel agent” will find a mistake and also be more likely to share with others through the vast social networks that touch many of our cyber-lives.

There are sites like FlyerTalk.com which have some of the most brilliant air travel gurus in the world and have a network that can spread the word in the speed of an electron to hundreds and then on to myriad forms of social network broadcasting.

Mistakes are not Necessarily Honored

There has been great debate on whether suppliers should honor a mistake or not. I’ll bet you can guess which side of the debate the players are on …

I was recently at a Travel CEO conference in Orlando and got the privilege to meet one of the godfathers of the “Mileage Run” and air travel affinity message boards, Randy Petersen, he happened to be on a panel with the CEO of Travelocity and brought up the question of mistake airfare (and hotel). She noted that Travelocity had in certain cases honored mistakes and in other cases did not — my guess is depending on which way the press might have blown to their advantage or disadvantage — and also noted that Travelocity had put in systems to monitor for mistakes so they could notify their suppliers who might not realize they had a “mistake” issue.

For many air travel is a hobby and airfare mistakes are part of the fun — just for fun we pulled our huge database of historical alerts (we save every alert we send to consumers) for the past year and noted dozens of mistakes — I’ll highlight a couple at the end — my suggestion to all on the trail of an airfare mistake, use technology to help you find them but don’t be surprised if the odds get more and more like the lottery…

• $0 airfare from Denver (DEN) to Lihue (LIH) (Kauai in Hawaii) ATA airlines for a few hours on Nov 8th
• $0 airfare from Miami (MIA) to Santa Barbara (SBA) in July
• $0 airfare from Boston (BOS) to San Juan (SJU) last December