Leading Hotels of the World Promotion
Leading Hotels of the World ran a promotion this week, where they were offering hotel rooms at $19.28 per night – not bad for 4-5 star hotels. They had 150,000 sign ups and thought they were well prepared for the web-based sale. Unfortunately, it all went wrong and their servers fell over, so nobody got anything.
Overall, their response to this was pretty good. They sent out an email pretty quickly with an alternative method – fill in a form and email it, in a first come, first served basis (from a fixed starting point). This was obviously a quick-meeting, what do we do type solution as it is leaves the door open to people who did not pre-register as required. A further follow up email stated:
Thank you so much for your continued patience with The Leading Hotels of the World. We are extremely sorry for the inconveniences we have caused and regret to advise you that the USD 19.28 email promotion scheduled for tomorrow October 2nd shall be postponed.
Although our original back-up plan provided a viable solution for the 150,000 people who were registered, it was met with some confusion over submission procedures and timing. In addition, we have become increasingly concerned that a large number of non-registered respondents plan to submit forms which would inundate the system and greatly diminish your chances of securing a USD 19.28 rate.
So it’s all on hold until they think of another way of doing the promotion. From a brand perspective, this could be really bad, leading to reduced confidence in something that is all about luxury and premium service. But I think their email communications kept people informed, were apologetic and sincere enough to ameliorate the problem.
What else could they have done?
- Better stress testing? Yes, but stress testing on back-up servers doesn’t always translate to what happens in the real world on production servers. They knew the number of registered users – my guess is there were a LOT more people hitting the site trying to book.
- Alternative methods of communication on a different server? Have another way of getting the message out in a different place. Email is the obvious, as they used, but you could have a blog, a Twitter feed or something else.
- In fact, having a more personal place to share news and thoughts would be good – I don’t want to download pdfs to read what is going on
So what else would you have done?
