I suppose it boils down to what you can swallow financially. For the big guns; they might be able to meet the short fall. For smaller companies; honouring a pricing error like that could be pretty devastating. Especially if its as much as you put in your example, which is 8.5% (that’s probably all the profit in the booking, if not more)

Its nice to see Air New Zealand apologise for the error and im sure that from a consumer point of view they’d like to see prices honoured but sometimes its not possible. We all make mistakes.

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Hi – I saw your link on Twitter and as someone who produces newsletters for travel companies, it’s a subject I’m very interested in – and concerned about!

When we quote prices, it’s always with the disclaimer that prices are correct at the time of publication, but subject to changes.

Even with this disclaimer though, we do make every effort to send the newsletters out when the offers are fresh (i.e. before they have changed) – just in case….

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Depends entirely on the difference in price to be honest. If it was £50, maybe they’d honour it if someone kicked up a real fuss – if it’s any more than that, I would expect them to say no.

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Why most company’s have small print saying something like “special offer can be withdrawn at any time” or “Prices correct at time of printing” in an industry where prices can change by the second e-mail offers are very hard to do.

Queston for you Darren, would you still expect the company to honor the first price after they had sent the second e-mail?

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Listen, everyone can make an honest mistake, so long as it is not an attempt to mislaid. There is a well established get out clause for vendors called EE&O which stands for Excluding Errors and Omissions. I would have thought this should cover it. There should not be one rule for large operators and one for small (who may not be able to afford the costs of a large mistake). So as long as operators say they have done their best to check etc etc

It’s different of course if money actually changes hands, via an online system. Once an operator has accepted your money, there is no going back.

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James is right. It was an error, they apologised and put it right. Case closed. Anything like this is an invitation to treat, not the basis of a contract. Now, where there is a wider issue here, is with the matter of what may be the basis for the offer in the first place. It surprises me that no-one has ever questioned the total lack of any transparency on the infamous “taxes and charges” bit that gets added on after the headline fare.

Not all airlines are guilty of this. Easyjet (and on the face of it Air NZ) made a point of saying fare to xyz is x pounds, full stop. This is very praiseworthy. Unfortunately, it is not a case of “other airlines please copy”. Take the recent fare offer on, say, Virgin to New York.

Actually, it’s to Newark and its only on certain flights on certain days of the week and once you have worked through all that, along comes the taxes and charges. In amongst all this is the XY “tax”, aka supposed money for the petrol and it this one that allows airlines to be, shall we say, a tad economical with the facts. The offer may be a fare of £45, but after the t’s and c’s we are back up to £250 – of which over £100 is YQ. Or take a recent Malaysian fare of £300 to BKK (Bangkok) – had to be booked in L class (which is how the airlines divide up the fares allocated to seating on our reservation systems or GDS’s).

I searched and searched, try as I might, although there was L class (occasionally) London to KUL, there was naff all out of KL to BKK – unless one was effectively prepared to overnight in KL. Fuel costs have come down. YQ hasn’t. Cheap fares are advertised, availability is very scarce. The t’s and c’s are also a useful mechanism – or wheeze – for ditching other costs. The charge for the privilige of using Heathrow, or UB tax – £12-ish, for “additional security after 9 Sept” – one would have thought that could be incorporated into the fare by now and so on. Every so often, airlines think of a new item they can put under the t and c section – and you will not have the faintest idea what it is for. EU solidarity tax, for example….

I could rant on for hours but the point is that a, perhaps, honest mistake should not be chastised rather it is time to look at transparency in the add on’s and how they relate to an email offer that would be interesting. My personal view is that one should only be able to advertise the fare that the “Person on the Clapham Omnibus” could reasonably expect to find charged to him or her, after the ticket has been purchased.

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Genuine errors happen. I don’t think they should have to be honoured but the action should be in correcting the faulty info as quickly as possible and as thoroughly as possible. Air NZ may be able to swallow 180 pounds but what if the transposition was 9200 and 2900 pounds for an expensive holiday??

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I agree with James as well — mistakes happen. Air New Zealand owned up to the mistake, and that’s that. If the trip is already purchased, that’s another thing entirely, but accidentally printing the wrong price in an advertisement is no contract to the buyer. The real question is, would they have sent out a correction if they had accidentally advertised the price as higher than it actually is?

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I think it is unreasonable to expect a genuine mistake that has been quickly discovered and altered to be honoured. If the wrong price had been put on a card in a window then quickly taken down and replaced, no one would know about the mistake. With email, once it’s in your in-box it is there, and companies have no choice but to alert the recipients and apologise – which is fair enough.

As most people who have commented seem to say, we are all capable of making mistakes. And while I think yes, a bigger company could probably cover the costs if they needed to maintain the goodwill of the customer, it could make the difference of sink or swim to a small company if they had to cover it.

As Irv, says, an accidental typo of the wrong price does not a contract make – and flight times are liable to change at any given moment anyhow, the market fluctuates so much. We’d be as mental as the US is regarding ‘litigation culture’ if we forced companies to honour simple and genuine mistakes which haven’t had any damaging effects, whether the travel trade or any other industry!

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As a former newspaper reporter of 30-plus years, I urge anyone wth a serious complaint (such as the wheelchair incidents) to contact as many newspapers as they can. I got into newspaper work because I wanted to help people and sometimes newspapers are the only place they have to turn–and nine times out of ten we reporters get results. Use the media. We are always looking for stories like like. In my career, I’ve found fresh figs for a little old lady, a wheelchair ramp for a man who couldn’t afford one, gifts for teens with serious diseases, homes for people about to be evicted. People really do have hearts and if you use the right venue, they will pour them out to help.

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I just had a price quoted only to be told this was wrong. They emailed me a quote and then replyed to clarify that this was the complete pricing, this person responded that yes it was the complete price! I on several occations stated that I needed to book and pay for this fare no response, so I contacted store manager. Now they dont think they should honor it?

There is no disclainer on the email however there are links to them that do not lead anywhere.

I believe they should honor this fare, and would like any advice from anyone what I should do. This was not a typo or anything of that nature…it was a quote based on information given during a conversation via phone originally.

Once I received the quote I wanted to book and pay and so I emailed to clarify that this would be the complete price to which she responded YES that it was complete pricing all that we would need to pay.

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