More than 30 000 FlySafair 2022 mega sale R8 tickets were already sold out before dusk on Wednesday. The tickets were available for selected domestic routes and could only be bought online via FlySafair’s website from as early as 9 am.
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.
FlySafair is well-known for its annual “mega-sale as well as being South Africa’s low-cost carrier.
This big sale dates back in August 2015, a year after the airline took its first flight, and around 30,000 tickets were sold for R1 each. FlySafair also repeated the move in 2018 where the same number of tickets were offered at R4 each. In 2019 the number was higher, with 45,000 tickets sold for R5 each.
FlySafair announced shortly before 16:00 on Wednesday that all 30,000 R8 tickets had sold out, an hour before cut-off time, but that it would continue a “15% off sale” with details to follow.
FlySafair’s mega-sale was put on hold in 2020 and 2021 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, which grounded flights and disrupted travel demand. These online sales overwhelmed FlySafair’s booking platform, with bargain-hunters rushing to the site to grab the cheapest flights in South Africa.
FlySafair’s Chief Marketing Officer, Kirby Gordon said that during the last sale, FlySafair’s website, which at the time had the capacity to handle 260,000 sessions at once, malfunctioned.
“As ever, we’ve drawn on our learnings from years before in terms of how to beef up capacity in anticipation of the traffic,”
“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.”
The R8 sale was first marketed towards the end of April, offering three lucky people a priority pass which allowed them to jump the queue and have the first pick of massively discounted flights. To enter the lucky draw, travellers would need to tell FlySafair where they would fly with an R8 ticket.
Those without a “priority pass” needed to rely on patience and luck. To stop the site from crashing, FlySafair’s booking platform first held shoppers in a “waiting room”. Every few minutes, a certain number of people in this online waiting room could enter the actual booking platform, where they’d be able to pick up the R8 flights.
for whom was given access to the booking platform from the waiting room – was done at random and not on a first-come, first-served basis. “It’s literally luck of the draw,” says Gordon.
Shoppers would have to find these R8 flights, available on selected domestic routes for use up until the end of October 2022, via the platform’s low fare finder page.
Only one-way flight tickets, for selected domestic departures between 05 May 2022 and the end of October 2022, were included in the R8 sale, according to the FlySafair’s terms and conditions.
