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Hoping to buy $442 rail passes for $125 during an online promotion, Henry Sands said he and his wife, Kaaran, spent 15 hours researching train schedules, hotels and more for their upcoming trip to Europe.

"I was ready to go," said Sands, who lives in Los Angeles.

But the Rail Europe website , www.raileurope.com, never offered him a chance to get the deal, he said. All it displayed, Sands said, was a "Coming Soon" notice and then, minutes after the sale was to have started, a second notice saying the passes were sold out.

"I feel duped," Sands said.

It isn't clear whether Sands and dozens of others who posted complaints about the promotion in online chat rooms last month were misled. That's one problem with fast-moving Internet sales, where travel deals appear and disappear like Ferraris darting on and off a freeway.

Rail Europe Inc., which is based in New York, said the discount offer for a three-country Eurail Select Pass, launched May 12 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Eurail, was real.

"There are lots of people who are walking around with $125 passes," company spokeswoman Samina Sabir said, although she would not provide numbers.

The legal picture is equally murky.

Albert Norman Shelden, a California deputy attorney general, said that, based on my description of the Rail Europe promotion, it was hard to tell whether it violated laws on deceptive advertising.

"But it's certainly questionable," he added. "It certainly raises red flags."

Relevant laws heavily rely on what the seller intended to do.

Federal codes describe forbidden "bait advertising" as "an alluring but insincere offer to sell a product or service which the advertiser in truth does not intend or want to sell." California laws on fraud contain similar wording.

One test of insincerity, in both codes, is whether the seller failed to supply "reasonably" expected demand for a product.

But how do you predict demand for an online sale?

That was Rail Europe's problem, Sabir said. News about the $125 deal, carried in the Los Angeles Times Travel section and other publications and on websites in the U.S. and Canada, produced unprecedented response, she said.

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