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TICKETS CANCELLED: BA fare error: First Class to Asia £795, Sydney £1335

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EDIT:  British Airways has decided not to honour these tickets.  You will see via Manage My Booking that your flight is cancelled.  No-one has yet received an explanatory email from BA and there is no timetable yet for payment refunds.

It seems that someone at British Airways has misfiled some fares out of Germany.

First Class to Kuala Lumpur out of any German airport is pricing at £795 return.  Sydney is £1,335 return – in First.

I am not at my desk so can’t write much.  Go to this Flyertalk thread for details.

I got it to price so it is working.  Whether BA will cancel your ticket or not is a different question ….. they may well do. 

I fully expect this fare to be withdrawn within 1 hour.

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Comments (97)

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.

  • Al says:
    21 Aug21 August 01:06

    Ok, so I put my tinfoil hat on and wondered something. There have been stories about BA clamping down on people missing the final leg of their ex-eu flights. They really need a test case in court to settle this … they’re losing significant revenue otherwise.

    A few weeks ago there were ‘mistake’ J fares and yesterday there were ‘mistake’ F fares. I’m not sure BA has had that many mistakes (outside of fuel dumping) in the last few years.

    The sort of people who jump on these mistake fares are also the people who might not fork out for the final leg of an ex-eu. Send them all a letter asking for the fare difference. Most will pay up, and one or two will take it all the way to court. If the BA lawyers are correct then it’ll become law that missing the last leg entitles the airline to reprice the entire ticket.

    For this to work you need a large volume of sales where you can be sure a high-ish percentage will miss their last leg. You need the proof that this isn’t isolated to a few people who have family members who fell ill. Show that 40% of ex-eu passengers who bought first class tickets to KUL on 20/08/15 missed the last leg. The court isn’t going to side with someone who is resident in the UK but flies to Germany in order to then fly back and avoid UK APD tax.

    Should I upgrade my tinfoil hat to an aluminium foil one?

    • SH says:
      21 Aug21 August 10:04

      Al good theory! However, do not forget that these fares also attracted travellers in Germany. I saw a lot of them taking advantage of these tickets. No issue here to miss any of the legs …

  • Easterdownunder says:
    21 Aug21 August 10:57

    So I went on to “manage my booking” for this last night and lo and behold the seat map was now available and we were able to select our seats for all legs – wasn’t available in the morning when I booked. I was half expecting to have been frozen out, but no.

  • jeff says:
    21 Aug21 August 12:28

    Was this fare ‘mistake” similar to the HKG deal recently…allowing long stopovers in London (and HKG etc) ?

    • Breeze says:
      24 Aug24 August 14:18

      Hi Jeff, the HKG deal is on, just did our first leg from Frankfurt last week, that fare price was not an error though.

  • Howard says:
    21 Aug21 August 12:29

    I would be surprised to see BA sue customers. Its really bad PR.

    As for the price error yesterday BA would be best advised to say it was a mistake but anyone with a booking we will honour. They are not really losing much money and they would get great publicity from the situation.

  • Adam says:
    21 Aug21 August 13:15

    I was able to book 2 Berlin – Sydney tickets in First Class yesterday. Today I was able to reserve our seats in all the flights in MMB and the first class cabin’s don’t seem completely full to be honest.

    I hope BA will honour these tickets. Will wait for the amount to be charged to my Amex and hopefully, all of us who managed to book will get some good news.

  • PE says:
    21 Aug21 August 16:05

    According to some guys on Flyertalk they’re getting cancelled right now…

  • Lloyd says:
    21 Aug21 August 16:45

    Yep – cancelled.

    • Adam says:
      21 Aug21 August 16:58

      Did you get an email? What does it say?

      • Patrick says:
        21 Aug21 August 17:09

        Mine got cancelled as well. @Adam: No eMail received yet, but the booking does not show anymore in my BA account and when verifying on checkmytrip.com with the booking code is shows cancelled.

        • Kevin says:
          21 Aug21 August 17:28

          Same here, but looking forward to an explanation on this one from BA!

  • HB133 says:
    21 Aug21 August 17:16

    Ticket cancelled (TXL-SYD and back). There go the honeymoon flights for next year…. Great shame as they have done crazy fares before (like the Seoul £777 deal in club).

    No word from BA – it’s just disappeared from my exec club page and if I put the booking ref in, all flights show as cancelled.

    How can they keep the Oslo-NYC tickets valid and not these?

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