By now you have all heard, I am sure, about the craziness on Monday of return flights to Israel on El Al being sold for $350 or thereabouts. Insanity!! A crazy reduction, the likes of which had never been seen before. I was feeling very regretful that I didn’t get in on it.
It was a third party mistake – fuel surcharges had not been factored in. A mistake that was not discovered for several hours.
Initially El Al said they would honour the tickets – however, yesterday they backtracked and tweeted that no firm decision has yet been made.
I have seen many holier-than-thou posts saying how dare these people take advantage of a Jewish company, causing them to lose millions of dollars, that it was immoral for anyone to have taken advantage of these prices.
Several of my friends bought tickets. All of them thought it was seat sale of some sort. Not one of them set out to buy tickets to cheat El Al out of money. All the moralizing is making my head hurt. Should we buy nothing on sale because it means the company will lose money? How was anyone supposed to know that these prices were a mistake?
I am sure there are legal issues that El Al needs to work out, I am also sure that El Al cannot afford to lose millions of dollars – a loss that would result if they honoured the thousands of tickets that were purchased during the glitch.
What do you think they should do – to ensure continued customer loyalty AND to safeguard their own bottom line?
In the Pink 