I really don't like this vulture culture. The main defence seems to be "the airlines are bad too". My six year-old now knows this doesn't cut any ice.
This vulture behaviour even extends to ruining small companies. In the UK recently I read of a company on amazon with a far lower price on a product than intended and the twitter crowd were all out demanding the company "honour" the price even though everyone knew it was an error. Amazon were of course siding with the customer but the company was saying it would put them out of business.
This class of mistake is a cost of doing business when airlines have computers and people playing these ridiculous revenue optimization games.
Unlike virtually any other business, it's really difficult to accept the excuse of fare "misprints" when in many cases airlines reprice routes several times per day, or even multiple times per hour. I'm sure that if they were able to say "oops", the number of "mistakes" would spike whenever unexpected demand was encountered.
If they have issues with employees fat fingering fares, perhaps they should review the internal controls.
I worked for a tiny online retailer that also did drop shipping for some companies with similar products. Once, someone found a hidden product someone had uploaded as a test: $1500 marked down to $0. It got posted on reddit and hundreds of orders came in all at once. They took the product off their site and canceled all of the orders, but the nastiness and persistence by the people who had placed orders insisting that they deserved this thing for free was mind boggling. There was clearly very little understanding that there were real humans on the other end of this website whose days they were making much more difficult.
Wasn't that a case of using a dynamic pricing service that went wrong?
They abdicated their responsibility for setting prices to let a piece of software set the prices for them instead. If the software did not set the price the way they wanted it is, ultimately, their own fault.
In a race to squeeze as much profit as possible out of the market they used dynamic pricing software and got screwed.
This vulture behaviour even extends to ruining small companies. In the UK recently I read of a company on amazon with a far lower price on a product than intended and the twitter crowd were all out demanding the company "honour" the price even though everyone knew it was an error. Amazon were of course siding with the customer but the company was saying it would put them out of business.