So if you happened to miss it, United.com glitched out pricing most if not all base fares at $0 this morning (Fares have been pulled already).All the craziness lasted for only 30 minutes, but I’m still fuming that today was the day my phone died on me…

Cue FrequentFlyerLife:

WHEN I MISS A MISTAKE FARE

Anyways, there are two things I wanted to mention about this. First is being able to catch these fares. Most often, these show up on either Flyertalk’s Mileage Run page and/or a blog.  Sometimes they go on twitter (follow me here!). I have an RSS reader (feedly) for that (and you should too!), but you have to been online nearly always, which is hard. Sometimes, you’ll miss them In this case, I did, even though I generally hear about these mistake amazing fares as soon as they blow up online.

In most cases these are shut down within a few hours, because these may be unprofitable for the airline/hotel/company. Sometimes they aren’t honoured. It’s just the name of the game. So if you’ve never seen/booked fares/rates like these, here are the guidelines:

• Book ASAP – you don’t have time to think
• There is risk involved and you may lose your ticket
• DO NOT CONTACT THE COMPANY INVOLVED!

The other item which is interesting is whether these fares will be honoured. The base fare was zero, so I’m not sure whether DOT 399.88a rules apply (just like with the 4 mile mistake fare):

“A purchase occurs when the full amount agreed upon has been paid by the consumer. Therefore, if a consumer purchases a fare and that consumer receives confirmation (such as a confirmation email and/or the purchase appears on their credit card statement or online account summary) of their purchase, then the seller of air transportation cannot increase the price of that air transportation to that consumer, even when the fare is a ‘mistake.'”

Did anyone get these? Will be very interesting to watch.

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