Dylan Bettencourt
FlySafair, South Africa’s low-cost airline, has returned with their annual “crazy sale”.
The airline announced that they would sell 30,000 tickets for R8 from 9am on Wednesday until 5pm or until tickets are sold out.
FlySafair explained that tickets purchased can only be booked for domestic flights and can only be selected from dates between 5 May until the end of October.
“South Africa, we invite you to throw your sanity away, because tomorrow, sh*t’s going to get crazy! Keep an eye on our social media platforms and your email inbox for more info on our Crazy R8 Sale, starting tomorrow at 9am sharp! You’d be nuts to miss out,” the airline tweeted on Tuesday.
In order to purchase the tickets, users had to go to the FlySafair website where they would be placed in a “waiting room”.
The website would pull random visitors from the waiting room every couple of minutes and put them in the booking process.
The selection was not done as a first come first serve basis but rather as a “luck of the draw.”
The waiting room and random selection process was designed to protect against heavy traffic and prevent the website from crashing.
During the previous sale in 2019, the FlySafair website had 260,000 sessions during the same period, causing it to crash.
“We’ve drawn on our learning from years before in terms of how to beef up capacity in anticipation of the traffic,” FlySafair’s Chief Marketing Officer Kirby Gordon told Business Insider South Africa.
The sale was first established in August 2015 when 30,000 tickets were sold for just R1 each.
In 2018 they sold tickets during the sale for R4 each and a year later, they increased capacity to 45,000 tickets, but for the price of R5.
The Covid-19 pandemic prevented the airline from staging the sale in both 2020 and 2021.
