Find two other examples of online pricing mistakes. How did the companies handle the problems resulting from the pricing errors?
The Internet is great for selling products and services. But don’t make a pricing mistake online! Intercontinental Hotels mistakenly priced rooms at one of its four-star hotels near Venice, Italy, for 1 euro per night instead of the actual price of 150 euros per night. Internet users booked 1,400 nights before the mistake was realized. Intercontinental Hotels honored the reservations at a cost of 90,000 euros to the company. In Taiwan, an eight-hour online pricing snafu on Dell’s Web site created tremendous problems for the company, such as 40,000 orders for a laptop computer priced at about one-fourth the intended price. Unlike Intercontinental Hotels, however, Dell refused to honor the erroneous price and offered a discount instead. The Taiwanese government disagreed, ordered Dell to honor orders for erroneously priced products, and fined the company.