Dollar fare promotion crashes go!’s reservations server

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Posted Tuesday, 12 June 2007, 10:17 HST @762

According to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, yesterday’s $1 sale by go! Airlines crashed their web reservation system.

Good managers plan ahead

Jonathan Ornstein, chairman and CEO of Mesa Air, go!’s parent company, complained that “stodgy managements don’t know how to react” to go!’s business plan. Ornstein also said yesterday that their outsourced web reservations vendor, Sabre, wasn’t prepared to handle the unusually heavy amount of traffic during the fare sale.

Go!’s management team should have foreseen this surge in volume, based upon previous fare sales at go!, Aloha and Hawaiian Airlines. Management should have alerted Sabre that their GetThere system would get hammered on Monday, so that Sabre could have additional bandwidth and servers ready for the sale.

Instead, the go! web site was barely accessible until 3 pm HT (Hawaiian Time) yesterday. The airline extended the sale after irate customers bombarded company offices with e-mails and phone calls.