For many years, I have flown from Boston to London for the Thanksgiving holiday, but this year, since I relocated to the midwest in the spring, I had decided that I would not make the trip to London this year.

Over the weekend, my parents invited my fiance and I to spend Thanksgiving with them in Boston, and we accepted the invitation. For the past few days, I have been playing with the airfares from Wichita to Boston, and found a low cost roundtrip ticket for the holiday weekend for $149, plus departure taxes. Out of curiosity, yesterday morning, I decided to throw London into the mix. I was hoping to buy tickets for under $500 each, but up popped an airfare for $33.30. Yup, thirty-three dollars and 30 cents to fly from Wichita to Atlanta to London to Boston to Atlanta to Wichita. I immediately bought the tickets online, for $126.44 ($83.14 for departures taxes) each. Within 20 minutes, I received an email confirmation.

This evening, I received a telephone call from Delta's customer service department saying that there was a glitch in their system yesterday, but that they would still honor the price of the tickets. I was told that the base ticket price should have been $939 plus the tax of over $120.

So, my fiance and I are flying to London on Friday the week before Thanksgiving, and the day before Thanksgiving we'll fly to Boston and spend the weekend with my parents and fly home on Sunday. Now, I'll have to keep track of the seating availability on the outbound flight from Atlanta to London to see if we can make the most out of this trip and get bumped.

I thought that I had gotten lucky before when I've volunteered to be bumped off flights and rewarded well monetarily, and with an upgrade to business class. This is even better than that. But, the best part is that after the completion of this trip, I'll have enough frequent flyer miles on Delta for a free roundtrip ticket to Europe next year.

Time to find a hotel room. Hopefully, Thistle will have a computer glitch in my favor when I make a hotel reservation.

And we wonder why the airlines are doing so poor financially!

leslie, this is such a welcome relief after numerous posts about how other people have been "screwed" by the computers and the airlines.
Congratulations. Go and enjoy! How could you not?

Good things happen to good people

Thanks, Patrick. This should be a fun trip, especially at the price. I know that I can never be bored in London, but since we have the time and money on our side (courtesy of Delta), maybe we'll buy cheap tickets on Ryanair and go somewhere else for a few days too. But then again, I have friends in Birmingham that I haven't seen since last November, and my sister and brother-in-law live in Surrey, so maybe we'll also do some visiting along the way too.

I thought the best bargain airfare I ever bought was a $99 roundtrip standby ticket to London on Laker Airlines back in the late '70s. But, it really doesn't get any better than this.

By the way, Patrick, I did get the dates right, but then again, I did buy the tickets online, without the help of a reservationist. Some computer glitches are just too good to pass up!!!

The EVIL airlines, now I understand. They practically give you a free ticket, so they must be changing dates on others to make up for the mistake.

Have a great trip!

leslie,

It gets better, if you act quickly, RyanAir is giving away 2,000,000 free tickets to fly between Sep.15 and Dec.1. You have 3 more days to book on www.Ryanair.com .

here is the link to the story:

http://www.examiner.ie/breaking/2003...ory113042.html

AAFrequentFlyer, thanks so much for the information. I briefly looked at the site, and there are certainly enough choices. Now, I just need to see which destination/flights will coincide best with the long-haul flights. I've got some planning to do here. There must be 40 choices for destinations for just the departure taxes, and one of them is Venice.

Hopefully, we can spend 3 days somewhere that Ryanair services, and the last night in London before we fly to Boston.

By the way, I just checked the Thistle website. There is no rationale to its pricing. A room for two (one queen-sized bed) at the Thistle Bloomsbury is 143 pounds sterling per night, but for one person (same queen-sized bed), it is 48 pounds sterling. It's cheaper to book 2 single rooms instead of 1 double room. By the way, breakfast and VAT are included in the quoted rates.

I took advantage of a similar glitch last year - $20 from PHL to GVA on BA. It came to about $120 including taxes. Not only were my tickets honored, but my first leg on the outbound was on Delta to JFK and that flight was delayed so Delta talked to AF who put us on PHL-CDG-GVA! They made $10 on that leg. LOL! Ever since then I have been very appreciative of Air France and British Airways. Ans yes, you have to be looking for fares at the right time...

Hey folks, the next time one of you finds a deal like this, secure your own reservation, and then immediately (if not sooner) LET US KNOW before the window of opportunity snaps shut! Thanking you in advance!

leslie,

Buy a lottery ticket or two!! Today's your lucky day!

I'm with Betsy! Let us know the next time anyone finds a glitch. Holy Cow! Am I jealous or what?!!!

Wow - that is the best deal I've ever heard of!

TO: AAFrequentFlyer

Thanks for the RyanAir information. Skipped right over there and booked a roundtrip ticket from London to Glascow for $25 (yes, dollars not pounds!).

Now I can visit Scotland while in London next week.

Once again, the Fodorites prove invaluable for my first trip to London!

Most appreciative for your sharing the information.

Cheers,

Ron

Hi Betsy! I would have posted it the first time, but BA corrected their glitch quickly. We tried to locate my in-laws (who came with us during that trip) as soon as we were done booking our tickets, but by the time we were able to locate them and have them check their schedule the glitch had been corrected! They paid $600 for each of their tickets! So it was really lucky that we were looking at fares at the time.

Yup, Scarlett, good things DO happen to good people!!

Leslie, my darling friend, I'm very, very happen that this happened to you!! Must be a return on that karma where you offered me your $100 credit (thankyousoverymuch).

I hope you & your darling fiance, B, have a most wonderful time overseas!!!!

AAFrequentFlyer --

Thank you so much for the FYI about Ryanair. We've decided to skip the UK and go off to Lubeck for 3 nights. Two roundtrip tickets cost $43. On the return back to the US, we'll stay at the Sheraton Skyline Heathrow (courtesy of Priceline for $40). We won't even have time to get into London.

Now I just need to find a hotel in Lubeck, and a transfer service between Heathrow and Stanisted Airports.

So, how's the trip to London going?

Three weeks ago, I got a call from Delta saying that they would have to change our flight from Wichita to Atlanta to a day later (flight cancelled due to insufficient bookings), also arriving in London a day later than planned. Being that we had a non-refundable flight to Lubeck on Ryan Air, we were in trouble.

Delta agreed to compensate us with $500 in travel vouchers which we accepted, so we're staying in Wichita for the holiday. We're a little bit ahead of our out-of-pocket since I had an accepted bid through Priceline too.