Delta's Ultra Cheap Tickets Not the Only Embarrassment of Late

Merry Christmas if you’re one of the privileged few who received the deal of a lifetime Thursday while booking airline tickets.

According to reports, some customers were able to secure tickets for as cheap as $25 through Delta Airlines DAL. The glitch lasted for at least an hour although conflicting reports say the window remained open for anywhere from one to three hours.

A roundtrip ticket between Cincinnati and Minneapolis for February was up for grabs at $25.05 per ticket while Cincinnati to Salt Lake City was only $48.41. Each of these fares should have been more than $400.

Many took to Twitter to let people know of their great find.

Nice little $36 transcon ticket from @Delta this morning. Thank you for honoring the mistake. Great way to start the 2014 season.

— Jamie Lovemark (@jamielovemark) December 26, 2013

By late morning, the problem was fixed although website issues persisted most of the day. Those who purchased the tickets wanted to know if Delta would honor the cheap fares. The answer is yes. Delta told ABC that the problem had been fixed and that it would honor the fares.

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It appears that Delta doesn’t have a choice. Rules set forth by the Department of Transportation state that an airline must honor a purchased ticket even if the fare was in error.

The company didn’t disclose how many cheap tickets were sold.

But that wasn’t the only embarrassment the company has endured lately. Earlier in the month, Delta had to apologize after Jeff White, a student at the University of West Florida, looked at his boarding pass and noticed the confirmation code was “H8GAYS.”

At first I didn’t think I read it right,” White told the Washington Post. “I was worried that another customer might think I somehow picked that code. If I were a gay male, I might have thought that a Delta worker purposely gave me that code, and that would have made me extremely uncomfortable.”

Delta apologized and said, “These confirmation codes are computer-generated and are completely random. “We will make every effort to ensure that a similar combination does not occur in the future.”

Disclosure: At the time of this writing, Tim Parker had no position in the above-mentioned company.