Johannesburg - In celebration of its first year in business, low-cost carrier FlySafair on August 25 released 30 000 tickets for just R1.00 each, including airport taxes, for travel on any of its routes between now and March 2016.
This set a new record in domestic aviation because the airline was essentially paying passengers to fly, as airport taxes are about R150.
Within hours of the news breaking, the FlySafair website recorded more than 30 times the traffic volume of its highest performing day, far exceeding expectations and the additional capacity that had been put in place to handle the projected traffic influx.
“The response was beyond what we could have imagined. We started the day with double server capacity and within hours had to bump that up to five times capacity as our website began to struggle under the load. Our tech partners in the US, who have experience with sales of this nature, said they had never seen demand at this level before,” said Kirby Gordon, VP of Sales and Distribution for FlySafair.
“We regret that many people were unable to access the site to take advantage of this incredible deal. We knew going into this promotion that there would be risks – the anger that was evident among consumers was definitely one of them. But we sold all 30, 000 tickets, and we’ve been thrilled by stories of children going to see the ocean for the first time, and families having a chance to reconnect after years of not seeing each other. This made it all worth it.”
The airline was asked numerous times how it could afford to give away so many tickets – nearly for free. When deciding whether to spend its budget on advertising or on giving more people the opportunity to fly and to experience FlySafair, it was a no-brainer.
“In terms of marketing spend we hold about 12 percent of the share of voice in our industry, and we cannot afford much more than this and still keep our fares as low as R399.
“We knew we had to be clever about how we used the money. We could have bought some advertising space and hoped that people noticed, or we could have used that money to put people on our planes who would talk about their experience. This is obviously the route we took,” says Gordon.
And people were definitely talking. On August 25, FlySafair recorded its strongest sales day ever, serving 64 times the number of page impressions than the previous day. Facebook post likes increased by 461 percent compared with the previous week, and the airline trended on Twitter for most of the day generating 1.6 million tweet impressions. It witnessed a spike in Internet searches and caught the attention of the local media, who covered the story extensively.
“We’re the new kids on the block, which means we have to prove ourselves,” says Gordon. “We’ve experienced enormous growth in just one year of being in the skies. By the end of this year, we will have eight aircraft servicing a full domestic network. One year ago, we had just two aircraft servicing one route.
“The marketing challenge was clear – we had to get our name out there and fast. We took the good with the bad. We’re looking forward to welcoming our new passengers on board. We know they’ll only have excellent things to tell their friends and that’s, ultimately, what we hoped to achieve with this campaign,” says Gordon.
Adapted from a press release for IOL