SAA's low fares off the radar

When news of South African Airways' bargain business fare blunder broke last week, there were predictably howls of outrage about the national carrier's intention to refund those who had snapped up seats online, rather than honour the ridiculously low fares.

Most aggrieved, of course, were those who bought the 640 Johannesburg to Abu Dhabi business class tickets for a mere R858 each. The normal price for those tickets is more than R30000.

The first "mistake" ticket was bought on SAA's website on the evening of February 26, and the last the following afternoon when the problem was spotted and sales suspended. A day later - February 28 - the R858 fares were cancelled and SAA broke the news to the purchasers last Monday.

Typical of the comments on online news sites last week was this, by "Mohammed": "Since the CPA [Consumer Protection Act] came into effect, SAA is bound by their contractual obligations to honour these tickets once the e-ticket has been issued."

"Kelly" went a step further: "CPA says they would have to honour those prices or in fact give them free of charge!!"

Actually, the act says no such thing.

What it does say is: "If a price as displayed contains an inadvertent and obvious error, the supplier is not bound by it after correcting the error in the displayed price; and taking reasonable steps . to inform consumers to whom the erroneous price may have been displayed of the error and the correct price."

CPA attorney Janusz Luterek explained: "The purpose of the CPA is to protect consumers from exploitation, such as bait marketing, but an error of the magnitude described here cannot be seen as bait marketing. It's clearly a glaring error.

"It is not the purpose of the CPA to allow consumers to exploit suppliers."

Luterek said while SAA was legally entitled to correct their mistake and refund those who hoped to benefit from it, "this is very bad PR for them when they are trying to get on their feet".

Common law refers to the act of consumers knowingly taking advantage of a very obvious pricing mistake as "snatching a bargain", and holds that the supplier does not have to honour the price mistake.

But in an e-mail to In Your Corner, Ebrahim Laher said before going ahead with his R858 flight booking, he phoned the SAA call centre to check the price.

Then I read a report quoting SAA spokesman Tlali Tlali as saying that some SAA airline help desk operators had told suspicious would-be buyers ,who had phoned in about the super-low fare, that it was correct.

To my mind, the act of checking a very low price eliminates the "snatching a bargain" accusation.

Consumer Goods and Services Ombud Neville Melville pointed to a recent ombud decision that found it was " not a binding precedent but illustrates the principle".

In that case a man asked for a quote for wood, and paid R6600 as quoted, but the supplier later said the quote was a mistake, and should have been R12 000 more, and refused to supply the wood until the extra amount was paid.

The Ombud's office held that because the consumer had taken steps to confirm the supplied price more than once, and couldn't be expected to know that it was wrong, he couldn't be accused of "snatching a bargain" and thus the supplier should honour the quote.

I suggested to Tlali that the fair and reasonable decision to be made, in the case of those who called the call centre to check on the advertised price, is that they be granted the tickets at that price.

Responding, Tlali said there was no evidence of any people having first checked the fare, and that it was not he who suggested that this had happened, but rather a caller to a radio station, and that he had responded that he would investigate.

In Laher's case, Tlali said, the recording of the call in question revealed that he had called to change the travel dates on his bookings.

"He did not at any stage make inquiries about the correctness or otherwise of the published fare."

One would think, however, that the call centre agent would have noted the ridiculously low fare and put Laher on hold while she checked.

SAA's final word: "Whilst the occurrence of this incident brings to the surface a number of legal arguments . and the doctrine of mistake, we would like to focus on improved customer service founded on mutual respect and accountability."

All the "wrong" ticket payments should have been refunded by yesterday, Tlali said.

E-mail: consumer@knowler.co.za

Twitter: @wendyknowler

Common Mistake

The UK Guardian reported last month that United Airlines had cancelled the reservations of customers who took advantage of a pricing glitch on first-class tickets sold on the airline's Danish website. A round trip from Heathrow to New York for two, for example, which costs £6118.92 (R109534) on the British site, was sold for just 974 Danish Krone, or less than £100.

Unlike SAA, which took almost 24 hours to discover its fare fiasco, United was on to it in two hours, but by then "several thousand" people had snapped up the bargain tickets.