Over the weekend I wrote about a discount of ~ $315 that could be applied to any Alitalia tickets as long as the bookings were made on Alitalia’s Japanese website.

Plenty of folks booked cheap US-Europe (and Europe-Asia) tickets with this discount. Some booked tickets inside Europe that were literally free, because they would have cost $315 or less to begin with.

I wrote at the time that I couldn’t imagine that US-Europe tickets issued under this deal wouldn’t be honored, but that I wasn’t so sure what would happen to the European tickets.

Alitalia pushed back and initiated cancellation of all tickets, claiming that the discount was only meant for flights originating in Japan and that their anti-fraud measures prevented the bookings by folks accessing the website from our regions of the world.

A few commenters felt the deal shouldn’t have been shared here, they already knew about it and hoped to take advantage of it but assumed that since I let so many people know about the discount that was the reason Alitalia wasn’t going to honor it. That turns out not to be the case at all, it is being honored.

Of course, sometimes these deals work out and sometimes they don’t, and you take advantage of them when they come along … wait… and then see whether you’re going to get a bonanza opportunity or whether you’ll just wait for the next one to come around. As I told USA Today,

“There are amazing deals that happen all the time, some of them work out and some of them do not,” he says. “I don’t get frustrated or disappointed when they don’t. Instead I think of them like a lottery ticket. If an airline is going to give away flights to Paris, I’d love to be one of the people that gets to go. But I don’t feel slighted if it doesn’t work out.”

In the end, though, things are turning out very close to as I expected in my initial post. Alitalia has announced on their Facebook page that they are honoring tickets as long as the price was greater than a cent (i.e. tickets that were literally free will not be honored).

[S]ince Alitalia intends to protect clients who have committed a, albeit minimal,amount with their credit card, we confirm the validity of the transactions requested on the Japanese site with a value greater than 1 euro cent. Those clients will soon receive an e-mail with their ticket.

Finally, in consideration of the great success of the promotion, we decided to extend the 25% discount offer for two additional days.

That 25% discount was discussed here.

Congratulations to everyone who benefited from this deal!