United Won't Honor 'Too Good to Be True' Airfare Deal

Airlines screw up sometimes, and for the unlucky few, all of the time.

The latest example is a computer glitch that led to extremely cheap flight fares from United Airlines (UAL).

And who's to blame the gullible travelers? Everyone is looking for a good deal. But if you are one of the thousands who nabbed first-class United tickets, for example, from London to Newark for a whopping $70, well, tough luck.

United Airlines issued a statement saying it wouldn't honor those thousands of bookings by individuals who were, "attempting to take advantage of an error a third-party software provider made when it applied an incorrect currency exchange rate, despite United having properly filed its fares."

Apparently, most of these bookings were for flights leaving from the United Kingdom. On Twitter, U.K.-resident David Ross tweeted:

Sad times, indeed. As for the Danish connection, United attempted to explain, saying in a statement that "the level of bookings made with Danish Kroner as the local currency was significantly higher than normal during the limited period that customers made these bookings."

What happened was that websites like DansDeals.com found out about the glitch and even published a guide on how to score these now defunct tickets.

All consumers had to do was go to United.com and change the country at the top to Denmark and book a flight, which had to originate in the United Kingdom, and be business or first-class.

The guide also instructed individuals not to sign into their United accounts and to purchase the flights using cards that didn't require a foreign transaction fee.

If it was that easy to purchase a super cheap flight then airlines need to do a better job at making their websites work properly because this isn't the first time this happened to United.

In fact, it happened in 2013, when people booked flights for as low as $0. The difference is that back then, the airline honored those bookings.