Delta Fare Mistake Yesterday

Deal sites were abuzz yesterday with the huge fare mistakes from Delta. They lasted a little over an hour and it appears that many non-frequent flyers got in on this as well. This was because it was not restricted to certain city pairs but were very low fares across the board for Delta destinations to all American destinations. You can read all about it and what transpired with the bookings here at this Flyertalk thread. Many tickets were going for between $25-$60 round-trip, some in first/business class!

I check that thread pretty regularly, but of course,I had checked it just before the deal came up. I found out about it after the fares were no longer being sold on Delta or any American-based travel site. Based on what I was reading on the thread, I went over to www.ebookers.com and tried there (it is kind of the British counterpart to Orbitz). There are only about 5 weeks that I plan on being in the US next year so it left me just a small window of what I could book. Since our schedule will be pretty full, I didn’t have time to just do a mileage run. Instead, I checked the flights for a conference I was hoping to attend. Sure enough, I was able to get a ticket!

Good for Delta coming out right away to say they would honor the tickets (which they were going to have to do anyway once tickets were issued because of DOT rules). Even though they were going to have to, I give them points for not taking a week or more talking to their lawyers about what to do. I think it helped them with their decision because many of the people booking were not very frequent flyers. Many of those people were probably just on trying to plan vacations while they were with relatives. As a result, they stumbled on these great deals and decided to book it. Because Delta is honoring the tickets without a fight, they gained some serious goodwill in the eyes of those passengers.

Please forgive me for not getting the deal posted here. Like I said, I found out about it at the tail-end and was trying to make sure that it was still working before I posted about it. After I booked my ticket, the deal was dead in about 5 minutes. So I just got in under the wire! Did any of you happen to get any of these tickets or hear about this? Check this previous post I wrote about how to prepare to book tickets that come up like this!