All Nippon Airlines error sells $10K Asia-US tickets for $300

Lucky travelers scooped up heavily discounted plane tickets after a Japanese airline encountered a currency conversion blunder this week — with some passengers scoring $10,000 tickets for a mere $300.

Bargain hunters raced to the All Nippon Airways (ANA) website in search of cheaper fares, with one fortunate flyer paying just $890 for flights in first class from Jakarta to the Caribbean via Tokyo and New York and back again, Bloomberg reported Wednesday.

The journey, which covers a massive 9,000 miles, would cost less advantageous ANA travelers about 20 times as much for a first-class seat.

Other attentive customers bought business-class tickets for a few hundred dollars — a steal compared to the usual $10,000 cost.

Typically, the airline’s business class tickets cost between $8,300 and $10,400 but were listed for anywhere from $300 to $550.

News of the pricing error rapidly spread across social media, though it’s unclear how many people took advantage of the deal.

Johnny Wong, who works in the airline industry, told Bloomberg he booked a return ticket in business class from Jakarta to Honolulu for 13 million dong — or $550 USD.

The cost of the flight he purchased is now $8,200.

“I never thought I’d catch such a deal,” Wong said.

ANA said Wednesday that the mistake occurred due to an error on its Yietnam website, which had an erroneous currency conversion.

The airline has not said how many people managed to purchase discounted tickets, but said it was “investigating the cause of the bug and the size of its damage.”

An ANA spokesperson told Bloomberg it would uphold the bookings made during the blunder, but later backtracked and said an official decision had not yet been made.

The airline expects to make a decision by the end of the month, but discounted tickets bought to be used before May will be honored, AMA said.

Most of the tickets purchased at a cheaper rate were for travel from Indonesia’s capital Jakarta to Japan and then to New York and back again to various Southeast Asia destinations, such as Singapore and Bali.

AMA is not the first airline to accidentally sell its top tickets for a bargain rate.

Hong Kong-based airline Cathay Pacific inadvertently sold first and business-class tickets from Vietnam to the US for as little as $675 — when the tickets should have cost as much as $16,000 in 2019.

The airline went on to honor those tickets.