Talk about your low-fare airline.
For a few hours this weekend, US Airways was selling tickets to a handful of smaller cities for $1.86 round-trip plus fees -- a tremendous deal that quickly filled Internet boards with chatter.
After discovering a "system glitch" Saturday afternoon that caused the low fares, US Airways corrected the errors by Saturday evening, said airline spokesman Chuck Allen. He said he did not know how many people bought the super-cheap tickets.
"Obviously, if we sold any tickets at that rate, we'll honor them," Allen said.
A volunteer moderator of FlyerTalk.com, an Internet site for frequent fliers, told the Observer most of the fares involved flights into Lebanon, N.H., or Watertown, N.Y. But several other cities, including Asheville and Hilton Head Island, S.C., were also involved.
With taxes and fees, the round-trip fares came to about $40 apiece.
The ticket error comes as US Airways is trying to raise money to leave bankruptcy protection in coming months.
Avid fare-watchers say errors in ticket prices occur several times a year. With fares widely available on the Internet, people who spot great deals spread the word quickly, and customers often buy tickets before airlines can fix the problem. Two weeks ago, tickets to Fiji from Los Angeles were available online for $51 aboard Air Pacific.
"Normally, the travel companies are very vigilant to prevent this from happening because it can be expensive for them," said Dave Friedman, 31, of Las Vegas, the FlyerTalk moderator.
He snatched two tickets from Las Vegas to Lebanon, with stops in Denver and New York, for $81 total. He says he bought them for what is known as a "mileage run" -- a trip designed primarily to build frequent-flier miles. Accumulated miles can be used for taking free trips and for membership in airlines' elite travelers clubs, which offer perks such as seat upgrades and quick airport check-in.
"It was going to be go in, grab some dinner, sleep and fly out," he said. Friedman said he wound up canceling the tickets because they wouldn't fit his schedule.
The error first was noticed on FlyerTalk Saturday at about 9 a.m. by a reader using the handle "MileageAddict." People often find the glitches by using a feature on travel site Travelocity.com known as a "dream map," which allows users to see where they can fly from a given city and at what fare.
Other readers of FlyerTalk posted their successes, including a Jacksonville, Fla., traveler who bought seven tickets to Lebanon for $269 over the July Fourth weekend for a Maine family vacation.
Nicholas Blanchard was in a Charlotte hotel Saturday when he got a call from a friend about the hot fares. Blanchard, who lived in Wingate in Union County until last year, now lives in Pennsylvania, within driving distance of Lebanon and Watertown, he said. He immediately jumped online and nabbed six tickets, five to the West Coast and one to Hilton Head for Christmas.
"It was a phenomenal deal!" Blanchard told the Observer Sunday afternoon. Now a sales representative for GlaxoSmithKline, he knows airplanes well. "I still can't believe it ... I spend a lot of time on the road and now I feel like I'm finally getting something for it."
Divinity student Randy Besta, 42, of Toronto, Canada, told the Observer he bought 10 first-class, round-trip tickets from Watertown to Eugene, Ore., for about $64 each. The miles will help him renew his status as a "senator" on Lufthansa, one of that airline's top frequent-flier designations.
He doesn't know anyone in the area. And even though he'll fly through two or three other airports to get there, he says he doesn't mind.
"I've always wanted to go to Oregon," he said.
