Error Fare ANA: airline will not honor business class tickets sold for a few euros
An error make by the Japanese airline ANA was exploited by thousands of travelers to book heavily discounted tickets to fly business to New York, tickets that will not be honored by the carrier. Money returned and many thanks
All Nippon Airways (ANA)
Star Alliance
Recommended by TFC
All Nippon Airways (ANA) canceled all tickets issued at the error fare that occurred last April 17. So less than 10 days later came the decision of Japan's largest airline, which informed travelers that it will not honor tickets sold at the wrong price.
What happened
On April 17, news had spread like wildfire on the net that. On the ANA company website, tickets from Asia to North America were on sale at bargain prices: a few hundred instead of 10,000. So many, including us at TFC, jumped in to book this error fare.
In my case, I had booked a ticket to fly from Jakarta, Indonesia, to New York with a stop over in Tokyo for 401$. You can't pass up the chance to fly at a similar price on The Room, All Nippon Airlines' incredible business class.
Of course, like us, thousands of other users had booked similar tickets. There had even been those who had booked dozens of tickets for friends and relatives with a counter value of $250,000, spending less than 20 thousand, as told by Bloomberg.
Although an ANA spokesperson initially stated that the airline would honor the tickets, yesterday came the cold shower with a post on the official website.
ANA said it will "cancel and fully refund all itineraries" for flights that were mistakenly processed, in a notice to affected customers on its Web site in Vietnam, where the currency conversion error was made.
What are the Error Fares
It is hard to know whether these are marketing strategies done on purpose to get publicity or real bugs in the software of companies or brokers. In the case of this Error Do, ANA blamed a technical error in the fare listing system provided by Amadeus, a travel technology provider, and said it has now been fixed.
The problem was in the conversion of the original price in Japanese yen into the local Vietnamese currency: this was because the price was only wrong if you booked on the ANA website for the Vietnamese market and paid in Dong, which is the local currency.
What to do if you book an error make
We have often talked about Error Fare and on our facebook group, dedicated to Italian frequent flyers, we often share these crazy fares. At the beginning of the year, dozens of our readers booked British Airways tickets to the U.S. and Caribbean for a few hundred euros and I told about my one-euro ticket for Finnair business class.
The advice is to always try. In this case, there are also those who managed to make the trip. In fact, ANA honored all tickets sold and flown before yesterday, But the basis of the strategy must be not to make plans, do not arrange any approach flights until you are reasonably certain that the tickets will be honored.
Wait and see how the company decides to behave and then plan the rest of the trip. In my case I was planning to fit it all into an RTW itinerary, i.e., a round-the-world ticket, while the eventual return trip I had booked for March 2024, although I was prepared not to show up at the gate, as I would not have missed anything anyway. Since I didn't book anything, I didn't lose anything but a beautiful dream.
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