Johannesburg - Low cost airline FlySafair launched a massive sale at 9am on Thursday morning where they made 15 000 tickets available for just R2 including airport taxes.
This sale, in celebration of two years of operations, follows a similar sale last year, where the airline sold 30 000 tickets for just R1 including airport taxes.
The airline had sold out of R2 tickets just after 5pm and shared that 15 354 confirmed tickets were sold on the sale.
“We’re thrilled at the success of the sale,” confirmed Kirby Gordon, Vice President of Sales and Distribution.
FlySafair’s R1 sale in August of 2015 encountered some issues when the airline’s booking website stumbled under the weight of an overwhelming amount of traffic.
The airline made significant investment into its IT infrastructure to deal with the demand for this year’s sale. Improvements included moving the reservations system from a server-based facility to a cloud-based facility and implementing a virtual waiting room to control the amount of traffic on the site at any point.
The airline’s website certainly did take some strain under the immense amount of traffic that it received, and while the website remained up and offered a steady flow of reservations, there were people who were frustrated by losing their place in the queue.
“We anticipated that the waiting room would create some frustration, but we knew that implementing a system like this would be the responsible thing to do in order to maintain the integrity of the site”. Reports indicate that the queue in FlySafair’s virtual waiting room reached over 25 000 people.
“This onslaught of traffic is tantamount to a type of cyber attack, so building a website to withstand it is like building a dam wall that needs to stop a tsunami,” says Gordon.
The airline anticipated that there would be madness on Twitter for the duration of the sale and South Africa certainly didn’t disappoint. “We fielded more than 5 300 queries through our social media channels” confirmed Gordon who went on to explain that they anticipated a “mixed bag” of comments combining user frustrations and elation at receiving tickets.
“What was fantastic was the sense of humour that people brought to the party,” he added.
#FlySafair started trending at around 11am and held top spot until the sale ended just after 5pm, beating #Brexit to poll position in South Africa.
FlySafair confirmed that the motivation behind running this sale was part of an awareness drive. “As with last year we debated the merits of investing a sum of money into mass-media advertising versus using the same money to subsidise flights.
“Last year’s sale proved to be a great success because our R1 flyers got to fly and share their great experiences,” says Gordon.
He added that “there’s no value that one can put to word-of-mouth advertising”.
Adapted from a press release for IOL