A first class gaffe: Cathay Pacific to honour cheap ticket error

Scores of savvy travellers will be sipping heavily discounted champagne in first class recliners on Cathay Pacific flights this year after the airline agreed to honour tickets that were mistakenly sold at a fraction of their value. Airline and travel blogs went into overdrive on New Year’s Eve after eagle-eyed shoppers noticed the carrier was offering first and business class tickets on its website from Vietnam to the United States and Canada for as little as $670.

That represented a staggering discount. A first class round trip would usually cost around $16,000 and a business class flight $4-6,000. It took two days for Cathay to publicly acknowledge the error with the airline on Wednesday saying it would indeed honour the cheap fares. “We made a mistake but we look forward to welcoming you on board with your ticket issued,” the airline said on Twitter, calling the mistake a “VERY good surprise ‘special’ on New Year’s Day”.

A spokesperson for Cathay declined to say how many tickets were sold at the discounted price. Wang Guanran, a travel blogger who writes under the alias “Domenicus” on hktravelblog. com, said he was working in the early hours of New Year’s Day when he spotted websites alerting people to the cheap flights around 5:00 am Hong Kong time. In two hours he managed to snap up five first class round trips from Vietnam to New York for $840 each and a business class flight for $699.

After that the searches on Cathay’s website stopped working. “I was very lucky,” he said. “Most people in Hong Kong were sleeping after celebrating, they totally missed it.” Most of those awake when the glitch hit would have been in Europe and North America, he said. “Until then it wasn’t looking like a good new year, I’d been working and was missing my family.” Estimating the flights will earn him some 400,000 air miles, he said he had a hunch Cathay would honour the prices. “I was betting on the fact they really need the good publicity right now.”