Dollar fare promotion crashes go!‘s reservations server

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.

Tagged as: airlines, Aloha, e-commerce, Hawaii, Hawaiian, travel