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

Thursday, October 23rd, 2008

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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More posts (maybe related, maybe not)

  • Leading Hotels of the World…… FAIL
    Consider 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...
  • Would your CEO apologise for a marketing mistake? [LHW 1928]
    Leading Hotels of the World are having a difficult week when they should be celebrating their 80 year anniversary. Following on from their mis-handled USD 19.28 product promotion around 400 blog posts have been written in...
  • Catch up with Alex in the real world…..[Site news]
    Just some quick announcements about where I am going to be in the next few weeks / months. I am not one of those people who go to all the travel industry conferences or events as frankly...
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    Do you have a travel or tourism related blog? A number of travel blogs have got together to create a "T-list" - a mechanism for self promotion.... Instructions: Write a post. Copy/paste the link list from the...

4 Responses to “3rd time lucky LHW? [Leading hotels of the World 1928 promotion]”


  1. October 23rd, 2008 at 3:07 pm
    Paul

    I managed to get mine in just before 5 past, fingers crossed!

    Main lhw site appears to have EPIC FAIL!’d though

  2. October 23rd, 2008 at 4:56 pm
    Alex Bainbridge

    Yeah - but looks like much of the promotion went pretty well. Good job (probably not helped by us armchair bloggers pontificating on this or that)

  3. October 26th, 2008 at 10:17 am
    Marie

    What a disappointment ! Keeping us waiting for their promotion and telling us that we shall be informed by mail when registered… which did not happen !

    So… the promotion is over. I would ha

  4. October 27th, 2008 at 8:47 pm
    Mark

    What a failure of a promotion. LHW hotel members should be ashamed of a good promo idea that turned out horribly unfair and haphazard. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=863668&page=142

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Comments for this post will be closed on 20 February 2009.




This blog is about travel ecommerce & travel social media with a focus on topics of interest to tour operators & B2C travel companies

Alex has previously started up a small tour operator (5 staff) and also worked for leading "dot coms", airlines, hotel chains and tour operators advising and project managing web, ecommerce, social media and reservation system projects.

We operate TourCMS - a web based reservation system for small tour operators

Exhibiting TourCMS & speaking at
Travel Technology Show
10-11 Feb 2009, London


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