3rd time lucky LHW? [Leading hotels of the World 1928 promotion]

Regular readers of this blog have been following (no doubt with some interest) the Leading Hotels of the World 1928 promotion saga. Other bloggers have written that I have “called for a video apology” - I did no such thing - I merely suggested a course of action that would improve their PR situation. I write from the industry’s perspective, not the consumers.

The most amusing write up came from Neil Maclean, himself a Travel PR guy, who wrote that I had “skewered the CEO’s apology like a frog on the dissection table”. Quite.

The failure timeline

Attempt #1
On the first attempt the LHW servers reportedly collapsed. Certainly it was a big fail. [I wrote about it]

Attempt #2
Luckily LHW always had a backup plan. Unfortunately the plan wasn’t up to the task. “Although our original back-up plan provided a viable solution for the 150,000 people who were registered….. “. Perhaps sensibly, in light of the growing media attention, they aborted their second attempt.

(The second attempt was mentioned in their CEO’s apology (which I have also written about))

Attempt #3 - TODAY !
If you hop over to http://www.lhw.com/1928status right now….. you can watch it in action

We are pleased to confirm that the USD 19.28 promotion will take place on Thursday, October 23, 2008 at www.lhw.com/1928. The sale will begin at 2:00 p.m. GMT (10 a.m. in New York, 7:00 a.m. in Los Angeles, 3:00 p.m. in London, and 11:00 p.m. in Tokyo) and will last for a total of 80 minutes 

This time they have brought in the big guns - Akamai [AKAM] - who presumably are helping with their CDN.

I guess the approach is that if LHW are going to fail, at least they want to fail having looked like they have tried everything. They have even publicly stated that they have completed some testing of their new scheme…..

Since enlisting the services of Akamai Technologies, Inc. last Friday, we have made significant progress with the technological redesign of the USD 19.28 Sale. With the majority of the newly-built system completed, we are approaching the final launch phase of this project. Tomorrow, we are performing the “User Acceptance Testing” (aka our internal “dress rehearsal”) in order to ensure that your customer experience is pleasant.

However, I think load testing would have been more appropriate than UAT testing…..  

I hope that LHW succeed this time. I will certainly be taking part - expecting a $19.28 hotel room in London during World Travel Market.  

On a related topic - is this turning into a FAIL tracking blog? Not sure I have a big enough legal budget for that.

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