A €30 ticket to Tokyo in a group chat: the one sign that reveals a genuine error fare

In 2019, Cathay Pacific accidentally sold business-class seats from Vietnam to the United States at economy prices — around $675 return instead of $16,000. The airline didn't cancel the tickets; it tweeted: "Lucky you." People actually flew. That is a genuine error fare. What normally gets reposted in group chats with the caption "hurry, grab it!" is, in half of all cases, bait that will vanish within 24 hours.

The difference between those two stories costs you money, stress and a ruined holiday. And you can tell them apart by a single sign.

Where exactly the mistake happened

A real error fare is a glitch in the pricing system at the airline itself or at a GDS (Amadeus, Sabre). The carrier mixed up a currency, forgot a fuel surcharge, or entered a tax incorrectly — and the ticket price dropped tenfold. The key point: the mistake is on the side of whoever is issuing the ticket. When you pay, you enter into a contract directly with the airline, and cancelling it retroactively is legally and reputationally awkward for the carrier. Lufthansa and Qatar both reserve the right in their conditions to cancel a "manifestly erroneous fare," but in practice they do so rarely and quickly — within the first few hours, before millions of tickets have been issued.

Now for the second scenario. Someone drops a link in a chat to an aggregator or a dodgy OTA showing "Minsk–Bali for €120." You buy it, a confirmation arrives. Twenty-four hours later comes an email: "Unfortunately the fare was listed incorrectly — please pay the difference or accept a refund." This is not an airline error. It is a mistake (or a trick) by an intermediary that never actually purchased the ticket from the carrier at that price. You will get your refund — but you will not be flying.

The sign that settles everything

Look at who issued the ticket and whether it has actually been issued. A genuine error fare gives you a real PNR — a six-character booking code that can be looked up directly on the airline's own website. Go to lufthansa.com, enter your surname and the code — the booking is there, the status is HK (confirmed), and the 13-digit ticket number begins with the carrier's code. That's it. That is a ticket. The airline has already issued it, the money has been charged, and cancelling it unilaterally is difficult.

If the booking only exists inside the personal account of a third-party website, the status says "processing," there is no ticket number, and the airline's own site cannot find you — it is an empty shell. Don't celebrate until you see a ticket number on the carrier's own platform.

That is precisely why Secret Flying — the most reliable of the fare-hunting services — only publishes error fares after manually verifying the route on the airline's website, and always advises against booking anything else (a hotel, a connecting flight) for at least 24 hours. Because the window in which the carrier can quietly cancel everything is roughly one day. Survive the first 24 hours with an issued ticket and you will almost certainly be boarding that plane.

What to do specifically if you're a Belarusian traveller

Pay with a card that supports chargebacks, don't book non-refundable connections on the same day, and don't call the airline cheerfully saying "hey, there's a little mistake on your end" — you'll only be tipping them off to fix it. And don't trust screenshots in chats: ask for the booking reference and check it yourself on the carrier's website.

The biggest trap is psychological. It feels like that €30 fare to Tokyo is slipping away right now, so you pay without looking at who is actually selling it. And the seller is precisely the answer to the question of whether this is genuine luck or a future letter of apology.