ANA sold US$10,000 business-class fares for $415 - then cancelled them all

In April 2023, business-class tickets to North America normally costing about US$10,000 were sold by All Nippon Airways for a few hundred dollars after a currency conversion error in the Amadeus-supplied fare system on its Vietnam website. The fares stayed live for over 12 hours and went viral in travel social groups. Most erroneous itineraries originated in Jakarta, flying to Japan and on to New York before returning to Southeast Asian cities including Singapore and Bali. Bloomberg reported one opportunist booked US$250,000 worth of ANA business-class tickets for just US$17,000.

An ANA spokesman initially said on the Wednesday that the airline would honour the tickets, but later that day said a final decision had not been made and would come by the end of April. The following Tuesday, ANA told customers it would 'cancel and fully refund all itineraries'. Among the disappointed: a 22-year-old Singaporean who had secured $415 return flights to New York for January 2024, and an engineer booked on $460 Jakarta-Toronto returns. Experts noted airlines need not honour error fares - though Cathay Pacific honoured its error tickets after a similar 2019 blunder.

The fare quote system's currency conversion failed, and the mistaken prices ran for more than 12 hours before ANA caught them.

ANA first told customers the tickets would be honoured, then walked that back within a day and cancelled everything three days later.

Conditions of carriage let airlines cancel mistaken fares, so honouring them would have meant absorbing a potential multi-million-dollar hit for one buyer's bookings alone.

The error sat in third-party infrastructure - the Amadeus-supplied fare quote system - which ANA said was fixed only after the episode.

A promise to honour mistaken fares made in the first hours of a glitch becomes the story: know your exposure before committing, because reversing it costs more goodwill than the fares ever would.

ANA cancelled and fully refunded all error-fare itineraries, notified affected customers by email, and said the Amadeus system fault had been fixed; customers who flew before the decision was announced kept their tickets. ANA did not disclose how many error-fare tickets were sold. Some Singapore buyers said they would switch to Singapore Airlines rather than book with ANA again.