How to Find Mistake Fares, Book Them & Save Hundreds (Or Thousands!)

Picture this: After seeing eye-popping flight prices to Europe this summer, you hear whispers (or maybe catch a glimpse of an alert from your favorite flight deal service) of transatlantic flights to Europe in August for just over $1,000 roundtrip … in business class. No way, right? Business class fares typically sell for $3,000 or more. Could it be? 

It's real. Take a look.

Welcome to the wild, thrilling world of mistake fares: the undisputed gold standard of flight deals. Want to save hundreds, if not thousands, on your plane ticket? Looking to fly business class without paying a fortune? It's a mistake fare you're looking for, the ridiculously cheap fares that pop up when – you guessed it – an airline mistakenly sells a fare for cheap.

These kind of errors are rare and unpredictable: You never know when the next one will appear. Over the last several years, we've found $63 roundtrip fares to Santiago de Chile (SCL), Delta Premium Select flights to Europe for $600, $218 flights to Paris or $238 to Croatia and back, and even a business class fare to Asia and back for under $700 … when it should have cost $7,000. But then you can go months, even a year, without even a whiff of another error. 

It happened again late last week, when Lufthansa briefly sold business class fares to Europe for just $1,000 or so – less than the price of a standard economy seat! Within a few hours, prices snapped back up to the norm of $4,000 … but not before thousands of Thrifty Traveler Premium got an email alert (and an instant text message) and booked at these prices for this summer or fall.

Get an instant alert for the next mistake fare with Thrifty Traveler Premium!

So what's really behind these ultra-cheap flights? How rare are they? And how can you get in on the next one? Read on.

What's a Mistake Fare?

These fares are just what they sound like. For one reason or another, airlines sell tickets at a cheaper price than they intended. If you see a plane ticket that looks too good to be true, it could be a mistake fare.

Maybe it's the result of an error in converting different currencies. The airline might have accidentally left an important surcharge out of the final ticket price. Sometimes, it's as simple as an employee hitting the wrong number or missing a zero as they enter a fare, as clearly happened with these Cathay Pacific First Class mistake fares from a few years back,

Mistake fares are also one of the few ways to snag a barnburner deal on business or first class plane tickets, like the mistake fare to fly Cathay Pacific First Class for less than $1,000 we found a few years ago. Competition for top-dollar customers is so tight and so motivated by big money, airlines rarely sell those seats at huge discounts.

In business class or economy, airlines have gotten better and better at detecting their mistakes quickly – or catching them before they're published.

But they still happen. 

How Do You Find Them?

By their very nature, mistake fares are unpredictable. You could scour the internet for hours on end every day all year and not find one of these insanely cheap mistake fares.

Let us do the work for you. Thrifty Traveler Premium subscribers get the first scoop on these mistake fares. We send out alerts for mistake fares within minutes of finding them and round up other mistake fares making the rounds on the internet.

Our members got the first crack at booking that $13,500 first-class ticket from Vietnam to the U.S. and back for under $1,000 a few years ago. They also got a chance to book a trip from the U.S. to Chile for just $200 – normally a $1,000-plus ticket.

But just when we thought we'd seen the greatest Chile fare ever, our team uncovered one of the best mistake fares we've ever seen a few years back.

No Photoshop, we swear! This was an actual fare that Delta published and that we booked in 2020! Fly to Chile and back, nonstop on Delta, for $63. While nonstops were available from Atlanta (ATL), you could hop on flights down to Chile from Minneapolis-St. Paul (MSP) for $186 roundtrip or get there and back from Orlando (MCO) for $147 along with sub-$300 fares from dozens of U.S. cities.

At the same time, we also unearthed flights to Lima, Peru starting at just $111 roundtrip, also on Delta.

While mistake fares have become rarer and rarer over the years, we're still finding at least one or two a year. Last spring, for example, we found a mistake fare to Dublin (DUB) that easily went down as one of the best deals of 2025. Roundtrip fares that typically sell for $800 or more were briefly on sale for under $150!

This unreal deal disappeared within a matter of hours, but not before hundreds of Thrifty Traveler Premium members booked dirt-cheap trips to Ireland last summer or fall.

And earlier this year, we found roundtrip fares to Paris-Charles de Gaulle (CDG) from Boston (BOS) and New York City (JFK) for just $219 after JetBlue forgot to tack on some important fees.

How Do I Book Mistake Fares?

One word: Quickly. 

There's no telling how long a mistakenly discounted fare will be on sale before it's pulled. It varies by how good the deal is – and how long the airline takes to catch its mistake. If you want to get the best deal, act fast!

We've seen some of the best mistake fares disappear within minutes of going on sale. A mistake fare from Miami (MIA) to Fortaleza, Brazil (FOR) for an astounding $132 disappeared less than 30 minutes after we first saw it. Others have lasted close to an entire day or longer. Long story short: Don't count on that insane flight deal sticking around for long.

When it comes to mistake fares, it's imperative to act fast. For example, Thrifty Traveler Premium members were treated to this mistake fare to fly in lie-flat business class seats to London-Heathrow (LHR) for about $900 roundtrip! That's more than $2,000 off the usual price, so go figure it only lasted an hour or two!

So if you see a great mistake fare here or elsewhere on the internet, don't go back and forth with your travel companion or boss about whether or not you can take the trip. Book now and ask questions later. If it turns out you can't use the cheap ticket you just bought, you have 24 hours to cancel it for a full refund. The U.S. government requires this refund policy for any flight that touches U.S. soil, so use it.

But there's also a chance the airline won't even honor the fare (more on this in a bit). So just as important as booking the fare fast is to not book anything else. Don't pay for any nonrefundable hotels, tours, excursions, rental cars, or other pieces of your vacation until you know your ticket is safe. Odds are, you won't get anything official from the airline unless your ticket is canceled. So if it's still in your account after two weeks and you haven't heard from the airline that they're invalidating your flight, you're probably safe to plan the rest of your trip.

It may seem counterintuitive, but after buying your ticket on impulse, be patient. 

Will the Airline Honor These Fares?

This is the million-dollar question.

Unfortunately, it's a mixed bag. The U.S. government no longer requires airlines to honor the mistake tickets they sell if they can prove the pricing was offered due to an error. Airlines can cancel the fare so long as they fully refund the cost of the ticket.

Ultimately, it's largely the airline's choice whether to honor these fares. And that's never a sure thing. The best mistake fares we've seen over the years show it's unpredictable.

Two of our favorite crazy flight deals from way back in 2018 were mistake fares that the airlines chose to honor. Some $238 roundtrip tickets from the U.S. to Croatia took the internet by storm, and we found it first. And amazingly, American Airlines decided to honor the fare that normally sells for $1,200 or more. We know plenty of Thrifty Traveler Premium members got in on this deal and scored an insane deal to go explore Croatian wonders like Dubrovnik, Split, and Plitvice Lakes.

But it got even better. In one of the best mistake fares of all time, Hong Kong Airlines sold $560 roundtrip tickets in business class from Los Angeles (LAX) and San Francisco (SFO) to Bangkok (BKK), Shanghai (PVG), and Ho Chi Minh (SGN). These tickets normally cost close to $6,000 or more. And yet the airline decided to honor the tickets.

But other would-be mistake fare flyers over the years weren't so lucky. Those crazy fares from Miami to Brazil for $132 were canceled shortly after booking. Air New Zealand once published an insane deal for $328 to fly round-trip from the U.S. to New Zealand – flights that normally cost $1,100 and up. But the airline canceled all those tickets, scrapping traveler's dreams of a cheap way to explore New Zealand.

More recently, the string of mistake fares has generally panned out for the travelers who snagged them.

Those $62 Delta fares down to Chile in late 2020 went off without a hitch. Same goes for those $900 business class fares to London a few years ago, helping travelers get away with a massive business class bargain. Ditto for those $148 fares to Dublin, $218 trips to Paris, $600 to fly Delta Premium Select to Spain, and more. The only mistake fare to get canned in recent memory was a real oddball: Air France/KLM decided to dump nearly all of the dirt-cheap business class awards to Europe it briefly sold in late 2023 … for as few as 1,500 miles each way!

That's the life of a mistake fare flyer. The only thing you can do is wait and see – and hope. 

Bottom Line

Trying to work out when a mistake fare will pop up – and whether the airline will honor it – is nearly impossible.

Do what you can to get in on these deals: Book fast, be patient, and wait with bated breath to see whether your ticket is confirmed.