In today digitally-driven travel arena, there is a phenomenon that whisper-viciously, with excitement and awe of its most committed flight hackers. It is stuff of myths, a bug in the matrix that matches more closely to winning the lottery than getting a travel bargain. Somewhere, in your Lahore house, on a quiet Tuesday morning, you are browsing through flight choices to make a trip on a different day. You search a business class flight to Toronto and are given a price that makes you go blind, swipe your screen and make sure you are not hallucinating: it is 95,000 Pakistani Rupees, round trip. Not the 950,000 PKR that you would have expected but so ridiculously low that it is likely to be typo. So that, here, as you have just encountered, is the mythical creature an error fare. It is neither a sales idea nor a promotion; it is a real mistake that was made by an airline, and in a brief moment, it can provide you the chance to book the trip of your lifetime with the price, which is unreal. The greatest aspect of travel hacking is the ability to discover and reserve these fares, which is an exciting activity that entangles strategy, swiftness, and a sense of mysticism.
It is also important to realize the nature of error fare before going out to the hunt and what makes it happen. These are not deliberately reduced priced tickets. They occur as actual mistakes that fall between the cracks of the criminally-complicated pricing mechanisms of the airlines. Its reasons are diverse, although they normally come under several major categories. The simplest of them is human error. A fare loader who is an employee of an airline can leave out a zero or enter 80 when it should be 800, or two different fare codes in a piece of text and end up publishing a first-class fare at an economy price. The other common suspect is a currency conversion bug. Mispricing in a global system, in which currencies such as PKR, USD, EUR and AED are continually being converted to other currencies, can even be disastrous when there is a misplaced decimal point or there is a fault in the conversion rate. They are also faulted with technology failures. The creation of an error fare can be due to bugs between various computer systems, bugs where the hefty fuel surcharges are unintentionally removed out of the total cost, a complicated multi-city itinerary that messes up the pricing algorithm, and so on. These are accidents and as any accident they are unpredictable and the cleanup is usually fast.
Such randomness implies that at no point will you have a better chance of finding an error fare by chance by Googling flights or airline websites. The chances are astronomically placed against it. The error fares are found virtually by a worldwide network of price-conscious deal seekers and complicated algorithmic software programs day and night. The search is a team sport and you just need to be part of the team. You will find that your best source will be a few of the specialized deal-finder websites and newsletters that have become legendary in the travel circles. The Flight Deal and Secret Flying and Jacks Flight Club all have teams of people and technology that is focused on searching out these mistakes. They can relay their findings to their followers via their websites, email newsletters and social media. The first and the most crucial thing you need to do is the subscription to their free newsletters. In the case of real-time alerts, their Twitter (now X) accounts should be followed and the notifications should be enabled. The time limit of an error fare may be simply brutal and can be only several minutes, and a push to your phone might be a success or failure.
In addition to these special services, raw, unadulterated search of these bargains frequently occurs in the online travel boards. A well-known example of such can be found on FlyerTalk in the “Mileage Run Deals” forum, where maniacs talked and reported their discoveries as they were happening. The same thing can be said of specific subreddits such as r/flights, r/travel when a significant error fare falls. The trick is to dive into such an ecosystem. It is also important not to limit yourself. Although you may be fantasizing about a flight departing the Allama Iqbal International Airport (LHE) in Lahore, you should also be on lookout on the deals in the other major airports of the region. The unbelievable error fare to make a round the world trip could be found either in Dubai (DXB) or Abu Dhabi (AUH). Assuming the price is right, the expense of an independent, low price positioning flight Lahore to that hub is a nickel charge in comparison to the fantastic trip you are going to have. Your ability to think should be an opportunistic flexibility with an eye on a deal which is set to jump up, in any place that the deal might be.
He or she will get an adrenaline rush when a notification illuminates your handset with the headline such as “BUSINESS CLASS Lahore to Sydney, 110,000 PKR”. Your success will depend on how you will behave in the next few minutes. There are very strict golden rules which you should observe. The first and the most significant rule is to book in time. Wait not. Do not request your boss to give you time off. Do not ring your family to align the schedules. Do not waste time over more than one minute in verifying once again the price. Each second you hesitate, thousands of other fare scavengers from across the globe are grabbing the same price and the airline revenue managers are being called back to base to correct the error. Believe that the sale will be vanished within half an hour and behave like that. Make the booking as fast and as concentrated as a fighter pilot.
The second rule is to directly make a reservation with the carrier, not with online travel agency (OTA). Though OTAs are very useful when searching, they occasionally have a time lag between when they book your reservation and a ticket being actually issued by the airline. This gap causes a chance of weakness at which the airline has time to learn the mistake and remove your booking prior to ticket confirmation. By making a reservation to fly directly to the airline, you may be made to get an instant ticket that greatly enhances your exposure to having your ticket being confirmed. When booking, make use of credit card instead of debit card. This serves as an additional protection to consumers and eases the possible refund procedure should the ticket undergo cancellation later on.
After you have managed to type in your bank account details and clicked on the confirm button, you are not yet finished. You have now come to the most tense part of the process, which represents waiting game. This stage has its own important procedure the most significant rule of which is: You MUST NOT, under any conditions, call the airline. Being on the phone with the reservations department to tell them, “Well, I just want to check to see that this 90 percent booking discount on my business class is right?” is the equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot when doing travel hacking. In a way you are sitting them down and pointing out the error. Not only will you end up having your own ticket cancelled but you will also spoil the deal to all those other speedy individuals who had similar intentions. Let the booking stay on. What you should do now is wait and keep your fingers crossed until your e-ticket confirmation appears in your mail mailbox.
You have to know that there is a difference between booking confirmation and ticketed reservation. The first email will most probably be an email confirmation of your reservation, including, more commonly, a booking reference number (usually a six-character alpha-numeric code). This is a good thing but not the ultimate prize. The e-ticket will be holy grail with a lengthy and 13 digit ticketnumber. The ticket number is your receipt of a contract of carriage on a specific time and date which is paid and acknowledged by the airline. You do not have a confirmed flight until you have that number of the ticket. This may be immediate or it may require some few hours, even one day. In the booking process, any non refundable reservations on hotels, flights that are connected, or car rent should be avoided during this waiting time. Keep waiting until you have your e-ticket in your inbox.
It is also crucial to go into this with the realistic perception of risks involved. Although a large number of the error fares do get honored due to the fact that the airline has the option of not spending its time and resources of discharging thousands of people in the negative publicity that this cancellation would cost the company, they are within their rights to cancel. A majority of the airline contracts of carriage have provisions that enable them to revoke tickets on the basis of apparent mistakes. In case your ticket is cancelled, you will obtain a complete refund, yet, you have missed the deal. This is the adventure of the game. You will miss many more error fares than the ones you book and some of them that you book will be cancelled. However the one or two kaleidoscopic victories you score here and there will pay off for the indigestions, and furnish you with travel opportunities that would otherwise have been totally impossible.
The psychology of an error fare hunter consists of constantly being prepared, and being as much flexible as possible. You can not say that you want to travel to Paris in the first week of the September and expect you can have an error fare to fit in. You have to do this in terms of the deal determining where and when. You were planning a beach vacation in Thailand and a miraculous flight to the winter wonderland of Prague pops up. You reserve room Prague. It is this after-the-fact romance that has the real essence of the error fare hunt. To the Lahore travelling man, this transports him to a world that at times seems to be far away financially. The vision of visiting the old ruins of Peru, traveling along the Great Ocean Road in Australia, or seeing the Northern Lights in Norway all of the sudden become real all due to a momentary digital error. It is all about preparedness. Subscribe to the newsletters, subscribe to the social media and have your passport and credit card information at hand. Every wrong connection is accompanied by another one soon the next corner of the street, and it may take you away to anywhere including Lahore.
An error fare booking is a rate of passage of travel hacking. The time when this e-ticket with the 13-digit number arrives in your inbox box, it is pure unadulterated victory. You have had the system. You have bagged up a trip at cents on the dollar and the world has shrunk and been brought closer to you. However, there is another group of questions that appear when the initial elation has passed. How can I get this amazing journey? What do I do to evolve out of being a one-hit-wonder to one who is able to make the opening of my opportunities a habit? In order to turn it into a long-lasting element of your travel routine, you will need to polish your hunting skills, figure out the logistical peculiarities of such a reservation, and focus on the psychology of a skilled pro.
To master your technique, the most important part to start with is to learn to separate the signal and the noise. The online resources where you will now subscribe to find deals will put the number of so-called great deals on their site, but a small portion of them represent error fares. A 40 percent discount on the flights between Lahore to Dubai is a great sale but it is a strategic effort by the airline to make it work. A business class Lahore to Cape Town round-trip almost definitely amounts to a mistake as it is priced at 125,000 PKR. It is important to learn how to identify the structure of a glitch, that is, an absent fuel surcharge, an absurd price on a premium cabin or a ridiculously cheap flight that is much lower than all its alternatives. This will enable you to save this adrenaline and mental energy to the really outstanding opportunities. To take your speed to an even higher level, one can go further than the basic email notification and install faster and further auto notification criteria. Through a free service such as IFTTT (If This Then That), you can now set up what is called an applet or a custom rule where as soon as a certain account such as Secret Flying tweets a certain word such as Lahore, LHE or even Pakistan an instant message is sent to your phone or a call to yourself. A matter of seconds can make the difference in a game like that and you will have a big advantage over another thousands of people who are based on a message that will be delivered via email.
In case somebody wants to graduate himself as a hunter to tracker then these glitches can be hunted pro-actively also though it is not easy. This includes plunging into the mighty and complicated ITA Matrix software. Although it is optimized to be used in research, it has been used by some of the most competent travel hackers trying to identify anomalies. Of all things, a search for a so-called fuel dump: a legendary, but now somewhat rare variety of mistake involving the omission of the huge component of the fuel surcharge (which may be simply labeled YQ, or YR in a fare breakdown). One checking the ITA Matrix may see a fare on a long-haul route that consists almost entirely on the base fare and government taxes and wonders where the YQ/YR component went. It is an indicator that something is wrong, and a precursor of a snap-booking. This degree of affirmative hunting would take a lot of commitment and well-established knowledge of area creation but the extreme of such crafts.
When you get your ticketed error fare in your hands, then a whole new set of considerations should be considered in light of a person with a Pakistani passport, to say the least. It is the most dreaded obstacle in the path of realizing the ultimate excuse of an out-of-the world fare. A magnificent 90,000 PKR round trip Lahore to L. A. fare is a devastating scene when the vacant slot of the next US visa appointment is ten months after and your trip plans are scheduled in three. Thus, your hunting has to be filtered with the help of a visa-focused filter. The most practical mistake fares to you will be those places where Pakistanis can travel to with a visa-free or visa on arrival or with a US-like easy and fast e-visa. Imagine Malaysia, the Maldives, Seychelles, Kenya or Turkey. On one of these destinations deals, you are guaranteed to book because you know the logistics are within your means. In case a mistake fare is found to one of the destinations with a long visa procedure, e.g. the Schengen Area, Britain, the USA, etc., the reservation is made only under two conditions: either you have (or are able to have) a long-term valid visa, or the dates of travel are too far in the future (thus, no less than 9 months), allowing you sufficient time to go through the appointment and application procedure.
Now that your visa predicament is evaluated, what you need now is to plan the trip itself but in some level of caution. Airlines will also cancel the ticket in the days after the booking except that the risk is very minimal and only after an e-ticket has been issued. This is not common but it is good to cross the bridge. In case of booking the accommodation, firstly choose the options of either payable later and non-refundable hotels or use the ones where you may do the progress payment. Do not give out non-refundable tours, rental cars, or connecting flights at least in the first week or two of reservation. Let the dust settle down. When a couple of weeks get passed you can rest assure your ticket is safe and can book the rest of your travel arrangements as well. Walk proudly into the airport when the travelling day comes. The check in agent at the counter only sees a valid ticket on his or her system; they do not see what you paid. Your ticket is just as valid as a ticket of the person seated beside you who had to pay tenfold the price.
As you gain more mastery in this hobby, it is worthy to bear in mind social etiquette and ethics behind it. One of the most important rules is not to be a greedy one. When you discover a miraculous mistake fare, make a personal use out of it. It is to be noted that one should not try to book a series of different dates over a whole year without intending to travel to resell a certain fare or take advantage of the system. Such behaviour has more chances of attracting attention of the airline and may lead to cancellation of all your reservations. On the same note, do not feel like sharing your finds via all your socially-sensible networks. The quickest method to have an error fare closed down is to attract mass public awareness. The accepted etiquette is to keep it low key and to a small group of friends or family that you know with equal interest in travel and who can act swiftly. With regards to the morals, you are not stealing. You will be accepting a price that is put out in a digital market by a company. In case the mistake can be found on the legal side to be quite apparent, then the airline will maintain the right to cancel and refund your purchase. Should they decide to pay it as tends to do to avoid the bad press, then you are merely the lucky mite that looks after an accident committed by a multi-billion dollar corporation.
This should not be a once in a life time encounter and a stroke of luck, but you should incorporate it in your financial and travel planning so as to make it a sustainable lifestyle choice. It implies creating a special account with the name of error fare fund, meaning a small amount of money, possibly 150,000 to 200,000 PKR, that would always be in liquid form and would be prepared to be used with a moment notice. These are offers that do not allow you to wait until your paycheck comes. The availability of ready fund eliminates the factor of financial hesitation hence you remain relaxed and concentrate on speed. It needs also a deep psychological adjustment. Naturally, you will have to be quite flexible, to the point that your travel plans would not be conditioned by your desires, but rather by the discovery of a bug. The process of planning your travel becomes not like this: I want to visit Spain in May, but like this: Let me see where the error will get me this year. It is possible to use this opportunistic travel hacking strategy along with others. To get an ultra-low air fare, you can use your frequent flier miles to buy positioning flights to a different city and then use your hotel points on a credit card to pay the bill on your miracle price vacation. It is a matter of making a complete system out of which all the tools are utilized to the optimum extent.
The result is that this journey makes you a different person. You will transform into an involved and strategic player in the world travel market rather than a mere admirer of the prices. The wall map no longer is an immovable picture of distant land exotic and costly. It turns into an active playing field, a scenario of possible routes and secret-kept opportunities. You realize that the cost of traveling is not a set, but a fluid number and that to those who are patient, well-planned and strike like lightning, unbelievable opportunities await. It is not your next visit to Lahore that you are still just dreaming about, but you are an active hunter, a member of a global village, constantly keeping your eyes on the horizon, with the next glorious mistake out there waiting to be revealed and open a new corner of the world.
