A report in the Sydney Morning Herald says that low cost carrier Jetstar was desperately trying to add extra capacity to its online booking engine after a $22 fare deal sent the website into meltdown yesterday.
The 22,000 seats for $22 online sale deal was announced to the airline’s 300,000 email subscribers at 2pm and Jetstar spokeswoman Simone Pregellio says that it seemed they all tried to book at once, adding “The site’s not down, but the booking engine’s having meltdown at the moment because we’re getting so many hits”.
She said, “You can get into the homepage, bit it’s quite slow with the booking engine and we’re speaking about getting extra capacity.”
“When we send out a sale email and everyone’s at their desks they all try to get online right away.”
“By 3pm the site had received its usual amount of users for over a 24 hour period and it was experiencing four times its normal traffic for the time of day”.
The sale offered $22 seats for two travellers on certain days for domestic routes such as Sydney-Gold Coast and Sydney-Melbourne in May and was not available through travel agents.
Report by The Mole from material in the Sydney Morning Herald
