For about two hours on Boxing Day, from 10 a.m. to noon, Delta Air Lines Inc. sold tickets for low prices on their official website and other airfare booking sites. Consumers went on a travel frenzy; however, prices were showing up incorrectly when a computer glitch offered the savvy deals.
A roundtrip ticket between Cincinnati and Minneapolis, for instance, sold for only $25.05, and between Cincinnati and Salt Lake City for $48.41 - more or less 90% off, since the original prices cost more than $400.
According to CTVNews.ca, the spokesman for the Atlanta-based airline said that the glitch was fixed, but "Delta will honor any fares purchased at the incorrect price."
A traveler told CBS that he paid $93.78 for two first-class one-way tickets, first, from New York to Los Angeles, and the other, from L.A. to San Francisco.
The founder of AirfareWatchDog.com joked, "It looks like Delta's programmers had a little too much eggnog yesterday." He also pointed out that it is likely that system-wide change fare-tweaking may have happened, and a mistake may have been made by a junior programmer.
The carrier has no idea how many tickets were sold at the wrong prices, nor do they have an estimate of the impact this has on their finances. However, the airline will honor the tickets sold at these extremely low prices, in accordance to the new Department of Transportation regulations, which required airlines to honor fares mistakenly offered.
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, airfare price glitches are common enough, and some customers look forward to them. For instance, United Airlines had at least four disruptions since March 2012, with customers paying a mere $5 or $10 only for security fee. Not everyone had the chance to grab these cheap deals, though. Amanda Maher of Boston, for instance, booked two round trip tickets to Nashville, for $104, but the transaction was not anymore valid when she tried to confirm her tickets through Priceline.com later in the day.
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