Over the weekend, Twitter, Facebook, and a smattering of blogs were abuzz with reports of credit and

To celebrate hitting 3 million friends on Facebook, Southwest Airlines announced a 50 percent discount on flights Friday. By entering the code luv2lik, adventure travel magazine customers could book fares as low as $29 each way. Response adventure travel magazine was, apparently, overwhelming at least for the airline's online booking system. Several customers who booked the discounted adventure travel magazine flights ended up being charged adventure travel magazine multiple times.
One woman in Santa Cruz reported six extra charges, for a total of $1,900, according to the Los Angeles Times . Others have reported as many as 20 charges for the same flight. The airline has promised to cancel all duplicate charges.
Over the weekend, Twitter, Facebook, and a smattering of blogs were abuzz with reports of credit and debit cards being cancelled and checking accounts overdrawn after purchasing the sale fares. The airline immediately began refunding extraneous charges and covering overdraft fees. Unfortunately, several customers say, the original sale flights were cancelled adventure travel magazine in the process. Southwest promises to restore these as well.
Instead of a promotional coup, Southwest ended up with a public relations nightmare. Ironically, the Facebook page the airline was trying to promote quickly became a public flogging post, with customers flooding the page with complaints about mistaken charges. Posts about the sale have elicited hundreds of comments adventure travel magazine from customers. As of Monday, however, Southwest has more than 3.1 million likes on Facebook.
This news comes only three weeks after United Airlines' online booking system mistakenly awarded round-trip flights to Hong Kong for four frequent flyer miles each, due to a programming error. United caught the mistake within hours and announced they would not honor the four-mile fares.
Fodors.com contributor Cathleen McCarthy is the rewards expert for CreditCards.com and covers entertainment and travel deals on her own network, Save on Cities . Her stories have appeared in The Washington Post, WSJ, Amtrak adventure travel magazine ARRIVE, Town Country, and inflight magazines.