Cathay Pacific honours £15,000 first-class fares sold for £1,300

It works out at just 15p a mile

Cathay Pacific is honouring missold first and business-class tickets between Vietnam and New York (Getty Images)

Cathay Pacific will honour first-class airfares sold at economy-class prices, it said today, as a handful of lucky passengers booked tickets for a fraction of the normal price.

Tickets worth up to £15,000 from Vietnam to New York were sold for just £1,300, which works out at just £0.15 per mile. The typical rate is £1.66 per mile.

A technical glitch saw several thousand first-class and business-class tickets sold for economy-class prices on the airline's website on 1 January.

The airline today confirmed that it would honour the mis-sold tickets as a new year treat.

Vincent Lee Chun-fai, an IT professional based in New York, spent HK$12,921 (£1,303) on a first-class flight from Da Nang in Vietnam to New York, said The South China Morning Post. Booked today, for travel in March, the same journey would cost around HK$147,500.

This isn't the first time that technical problems have resulted in huge costs to airlines that decide to honour their mistakes. In August 2018, Hong Kong Airlines accidentally sold round-trip business-class tickets between Los Angeles and various Asian cities for just US$560 (£444) and permitted travel on those tickets.

Compare this to the decision by British Airways in June 2018. The airline chose not to honour tickets from the UK to destinations including Dubai and Tel Aviv, which it mistakenly sold for just £1.