Low-cost South African airline FlySafair is today offering 30,000 customers the chance to buy flight tickets to “all major destinations in South Africa” from as low as R8 ($0.51) per ticket.
Currently, according to FlySafair’s waiting room imposed to ensure that ticket sales are possible without a massive influx of buyers and website crashes, there are less than 25,000 tickets still left up for grabs.
FlySafair is known for its semi-annual flight ticket sale and have run “Mega-Sales” since 2015, one year after it launched its first flight where it sold 30,000 tickets at R1 each. In 2018, the airline sold 30,000 tickets at R4 each and the following year it sold 45,000 tickets for R5 each.
The “Crazy R8 Sale” began at 9:00 on 4 May 2022. Customers who go to FlySafair.co.za will be taken into a waiting queue where every “few minutes” a certain number of customers will be admitted to be allowed to buy tickets from R8 “until they are all gone.”
Users who are waiting in the queue can enter FlySafair’s Fly Like a Boss promotion where they can stand a chance to win free business class upgrades for flights on the airline. Users are urged not to refresh the page once they are on the website as they will be sent back to the waiting room and will have to wait for the entire process to begin from zero.
The waiting room has been created due to malfunctioned experienced on the company’s website the last time they had a mega-sale, reports Business Insider South Africa. During the last sale, FlySafair’s website, which could at the time handle a total capacity of 260,000 sessions, began to fail.
“As ever, we’ve drawn on our learnings from years before in terms of how to beef up capacity in anticipation of the traffic,” FlySafair’s CMO, Kirby Gordon, told Business Insider.
“There are a great number of things we do to enhance capacity on a server level as well as with all associated services such as payments etc.,” they added.
Caveats
Only one-way flight tickets are included in the R8 sale, which are available for selected domestic routes only, to be used up until the end of October 2022. The sale will run from 09:00 to 17:00 on Wednesday or until all 30,000 tickets have been sold.
“R8 tickets include all airport taxes and VAT, but exclude any additional services such as, but not limited to, checked luggage, priority boarding, and seat pre-selection,” writes FlySafair. The airline says that these tickets are only for the airline’s Lite Fare option.
By Luis Monzon
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