Blog homeConsider the scene…… two marketing bods sit in a room and discuss ideas to highlight their 80 year company anniversary.
The senior marketing bod says to the other “Lets have a great promotion on our website….. you know - something that people will find remarkable and want to book straight away. Something that will drive people to experience our site for the first time (so that they feel safe booking with us direct in the future). What can we do?”
The junior marketing bod suggests “Well - lets sell rooms at USD 19.28 (as we are 80 years old after all). Let us set a time and make the promotion only run for 80 minutes”
The senior marketing bod replies “Yes. That is just the headline grabbing kind of idea I had in mind. For this great idea I will make you a director”. *
At this point the senior marketing guy calls the senior web guy and asks if this is sensible. The web guy says - yikes - we may need to do some load testing to check we can do this - but off the cuff - unlikely our systems can handle that load - could you at least make the promotion run for a day or two?
At this point the senior marketing guy says - “Great - call the graphic designer. I am off home now. Tell me when you want me to review the press release”
…… a few weeks later…..
The promotion goes live…… and straight away the entire site goes down for the entire 80 minutes. Senior marketing bod ends up having to make the following annoucement:
“We have indeed experienced technical difficulties this morning due to the overwhelming number of individuals who visited the site. Despite our efforts to carefully manage and prepare for this worldwide promotion, the traffic exceeded more than one hundred times our norm.”
Actually, seems to have worked some of the time….. (depending upon how you define work) - Leading Hotels of the World sold 6000 room nights in 1 hour 20…. not bad going!
For a blow by blow account and a stream of comments please go and read the Miss Expatria’s blog post
* [Alex’s note - all marketing bods are called directors, even junior ones - web bods are never directors - which is why the best ones always end up working for travel technology companies where we can live in our own world and write sarcastic blog posts]
UPDATE: Looks like the hotel company is having another go tomorrow…..
To remedy the situation, we are contacting every registrant to offer them another chance to participate in the promotion via e-mail. As was our original intent, the inventory will be available on a first come first serve basis.
We have over 6,000 rooms designated to the $19.28promotion. Over 150,000 persons have registered for the promotion and it is our intent to offer everyone one of them an equal opportunity to secure the $19.28 rate via our back-up plan
As one commentator states on the Consumerist, asking for 150,000 inbound emails -with attachments (a form you have to complete)….. is, er, asking for trouble.
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UPDATE #2 - Now looks like they are not taking the email based approach after all
“No rooms were actually sold (Wednesday), as the site suffered a pretty catastrophic malfunction, which could not be reversed when traffic exceeded many hundred times the volume per second than the norm. As you probably know, we had devised a contingency plan that provided a viable solution for the 150,000 people who were registered. Throughout the day, however, we have become increasingly concerned that a massive number of non-registered respondents plan to submit forms (now posted on several websites), which would inundate the system and greatly diminish anyone’s chances of securing the USD 19.28 rate.
“In view of this, we are sending out an amended email to registrants asking that they please do not email their form tomorrow. They will most likely receive an error message we have put in place as a safety mechanism.”
Via Hotel Hotsheet
http://blogs.usatoday.com/hotelhotsheet/2008/10/the-1928-luxury.html?csp=34