United Changes Mind On Mistake Web Prices
from the fly-free! dept
Late last week I posted that I thought United made the right move in not honoring $25 flights from San Francisco to Paris that were due to a mistake on their webpage. The readers who responded disagreed, and apparently so did a lot of folks. United has bowed to the pressure and agreed to give those flights at the price listed. I think this is stupid. I'm sorry, but there's no way anyone who bought those tickets didn't know it was a mistake, and United has every right to refuse to honor them. I think consumers are expecting to get away with a little too much these days. They know that if they scream loud enough, the companies will give in to avoid the negative press. It's fine to complain about legitimate problems, but these are just a few people who want to get away with basically scamming the airline. I consider it to be dishonest.
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Bait & Switch
I'll give United the benefit of the doubt and assume that it was a mistake. I'm taking their word for it, and not assunming that it was "too good to be true". Businesses have been known to sell stuff at a loss to either get business (loss leaders) or to drive others out of business (dumping).
Even with the assumption that it was a mistake, I feel that United needed to honor those prices. Otherwise, what's to keep a dishonest travel agent from offering too-good-to-be-true rates, only to claim a mistake after selling the tickets. How can a consumer ever prove that a business isn't running a scam? I suppose you could file suit and subpoena their records, but that's no way to save money...
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legalities
Somthing to keep in mind in all of this is uniteds legal obligation. Selling a ticket online for $25 bucks and then say oops, it was a mistake its actuall * is legally no different from target marking a nice sweater as being $25 and then telling you that the item was "mismarked" and therfore $50. If it is the businesses mistake then they have to simply take it. Otherwise they can be charged with a whole load of nasty things including bait and switch. This is why we have rainchecks as well.
just my $.2
Lissell
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Re: legalities
This is a difference between bait and switch and "we made an honest mistake". Look through any newpaper, over the course of a week you'll likely see correction notices. A $25 flight to Paris is not believable and should not be honored.
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Re: legalities
A $25 dollar flight could well be believable! Here in London, you can have normal flight prices for the equivelent of several hundred dollars that due to special promotions are reduced to essentially loss making fares (pretty close to $25 on company websites) to get people interested in flying in certain types of airlines (like easyjet and etc.). To be honest I'm glad that consumers actually have power to change the will of corporations, it's too easy to forget that out side of the US, large corporations really could give a Sh*t if they got bad publicity (taking into the fact that customer services in many other countries means just that, if a customer gets served they should feel lucky!)
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Re: legalities
Um. So all mistakes are final? Seller beware? I agree with Masnick here... There should be return policies that work both ways in order to protect everyone -- buyers and sellers alike... But I guess the customer is always right.
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