HONG KONG – Eagle-eyed travellers have snapped up US$10,000 (S$13,300) business-class tickets on Japan’s ANA airline for just a few hundred dollars after a currency conversion blunder.

Mr Rishi Kumar, a 25-year-old Singaporean engineer and aviation enthusiast, told The Straits Times he was alerted on Tuesday afternoon to the “error fare” by the SG Travel Hacks | Suitesmile Telegram group. Error fares or airline price glitches are hugely reduced flight tickets due to a mistake.

He told his friend Mr Tan and they quickly booked return flights in September from Jakarta to Toronto for $460 each. The non-direct flights stop at Washington, DC on the way out, and San Francisco and Tokyo on the return trip.

ANA has said it will honour the tickets for those people who saw the mistake and jumped on its website quickly to book and pay (the glitch was circulating widely on some social media platforms) but those who only reserved the tickets will have to pay a “just price”, according to an airline spokesman on Wednesday.

Most of the tickets were from travel starting in Jakarta, through to Japan and then onto New York and back again into various South-east Asia destinations, including Singapore and Bali – business class all the way.

The Japanese carrier said the mistake stemmed from an error on its Vietnam website, which listed an erroneous currency conversion. It did not state how many people had secured discount tickets, and added that it was “currently investigating the cause of the bug and the size of its damage”.

Bloomberg News spoke to several people who successfully booked what will likely be a once-in-a-lifetime bargain.

Mr Johnny Wong, who works in the airline industry, snagged a round-trip ticket from Jakarta to Honolulu via Narita airport in Tokyo for 13 million dong (S$740). “I never thought I’d catch such a deal,” said Mr Wong.

The 29-year-old said he felt the pressure to enter his details as fast as he could, racing against time before ANA realised its error. That ticket is currently selling for US$8,200.

It isn’t the first time an airline has inadvertently sold premium seats at a steep discount.

Cathay Pacific Airways accidentally sold deeply discounted first- and business-class tickets from Vietnam to the United States back in 2019 for as little as US$675 when the normal price would have been as much as US$16,000. It too honoured those tickets. BLOOMBERG

• Additional reporting from The Straits Times