The mistake fare playbook

Book direct, not through an OTA

Airlines honor their own tickets more often than resellers do. A third-party booking gives two parties an excuse to cancel.

Pay, then wait 24 hours

Don't add seats, bags or upgrades until the ticket clears. Touching the reservation can reprice it at the corrected fare.

Never book non-refundable plans around it

Assume a one-in-three chance the fare gets voided. Hotels and connecting tickets come after the airline confirms.

Move within the hour

Most NYC price errors we log die in under four hours. Speed beats a perfect itinerary.

What is a mistake fare?

A ticket filed wrong — a missing fuel surcharge, a currency slip, a business-class bucket priced like economy. Real, bookable, and short-lived.

How do you decide a fare is a mistake?

Only once a route has at least 10 of our own recorded price observations, and the new fare comes in well under that route's own median — never against a generic or invented baseline.

Is a mistake fare checked by a person before it's posted?

Depends on the source. Some are priced by an automated search with no person involved; others were first written up by a human editor on a public deals site. Either way, whether a fare counts as a mistake here is always decided automatically against that route's own price history — never a person's judgment call. That's also why the four rules on this page matter — nothing here has been manually confirmed to ticket.