Travellers score cheap first-class flights from Australia to United States due to Qantas glitch

For a short period last Thursday, first-class round-trip airline tickets from Australia to the United States that normally cost up to $28,000 were available from Qantas for a whopping 85 per cent off.

Due to a coding error, about 300 lucky people were able to buy them on the airline’s website for as little as $3400 each before the mistake was corrected.

“Unfortunately, this is a case where the fare was actually too good to be true,” Qantas said in a statement Thursday.

However, not all hope is lost. Instead of cancelling the tickets, Qantas said it would rebook the customers in business class “as a gesture of goodwill” at no extra cost.

Alternatively, passengers who aren’t satisfied with business class can get full refunds.

Flying business class on Qantas between Australia and the United States typically costs about $11,000.

Qantas’ goodwill gesture follows a similar blunder that was handled differently by the airline last year.

Last August, Australian regulators accused Qantas in a lawsuit of selling tickets for more than 8000 flights that the airline had already cancelled — affecting more than 86,000 passengers.

Qantas agreed in May to pay nearly $80 million to settle the suit, with more than $13 million of that sum awarded to the affected customers.

Its CEO Vanessa Hudson told CNN in June that the company had “let our customers down,” as well as its staff.

Airlines regularly make errors, selling premium tickets at a flagrantly mispriced price, though some have chosen to honour them.

In 2019, Cathay Pacific offered first- and business-class seats from Vietnam to North American cities for as low as $675 round-trip.

The Hong Kong flag carrier honoured the deal, tweeting #promisemadepromisekept and #lessonlearnt on its X account.

But it’s not always the case. In 2010, American Airlines refused to honour first-class return tickets from the US to Australia, worth up to $20,000, that it sold for the economy-class price of $1100. Instead, it offered $200 vouchers as compensation.

A year earlier, British Airways also failed to honour mistakenly sold $40 flights from North America to India, offering $300 vouchers instead.