Airline accidentally sells £13,000 business class tickets for £700

All Nippon Airways said it was ‘investigating the cause of the bug and the size of its damage’

Lucky break? It’s unclear whether All Nippon Airways will honour the discounted tickets (Getty Images)

A number of lucky travellers were able to pick up business class plane tickets for a fraction of their usual price after a currency conversion error on a Japanese airline’s website.

The premium seats on All Nippon Airways flights were on sale for economy prices, with one person managing to grab a round-trip flight from Jakarta, Indonesia, to the Caribbean island of Aruba (with stops in Tokyo and New York) for around £715 – a flight that would usually sell for more than £13,000, according to Robb Report.

The glitch spread across social media, with others sharing stories of how they managed to find a bargain, with reports of flights usually worth £8,000 going for under £1,000.

The airline confirmed that the mistake was due to an error on its Vietnam website. It didn’t disclose how many discounted tickets were sold before the problem was discovered.

A spokesman for All Nippon Airways initially said that all cheaper tickets would be honoured but later said that a final decision is yet to be made.

The Independent has contacted the airline for comment.

The majority of tickets were for flights from Jakarta to Japan and then on to the US.

Johnny Wong, who works in aviation, told Bloomberg News that he managed to book a return business class ticket from the Indonesian capital to Hawaii via Japan for 13 million dong, or £445.

He said: “I never thought I’d catch such a deal”.

This isn’t the first time that travellers have been able to find incredible deals due to a website error.

In January 2019, a technical glitch saw Cathay Pacific sell several thousand first class and business class tickets at for economy class prices.

Tickets worth up to £15,000 from Vietnam to New York were sold for £1,300, which works out at just £0.15 per mile; the typical rate is £1.66 per mile.

A day after the error, the airline confirmed that it would honour the mistake fare tickets as a new year treat.