Complete lack of planning
The senior executives at LHW really need to understand what a complete failure this promotion is, and steps should be taken to overhaul (replace) the entire marketing department.
First, according to Mr. Calder, they did not anticipate the response received. In today's world of blogs, viral marketing, etc., it is very short-sighted to not anticipate an overwhelming response. There was no planning or load-testing, or conversations with the ISP to prepare for bandwidth/server constraints?
Second, the change has been made to an email submission process, which now strains bandwidth again as all email will be sent at the same time, and supposedly the environment has been scaled to accommodate the load. I truly doubt this has been done. Further, services installed and configured would most likely have to be shut off (Sender Verification) - otherwise, three times the email has to be handled by the servers and ISP. These are additional costs as the IT department and ISP have to attempt to accommodate the poor planning of the marketing department.
At this point, there really is nothing LHW can do to repair the situation. Tomorrow will be a mess and there will, at some point, be some rooms allocated at the $19.28 price. No one will truly know how many, or if his/her email actually made it through the process.
One other bit of information: prior to this contest, the existing LHW.com site has been slow for months. Most of the performance degradation occurs when a basic query is made, supporting the theory that the entire infrastructure is fragile.
In the future, LHW should partner with a company that knows how internet marketing works, and let the professionals do the job right. At least I have the American Express Fine Hotels and Resorts as a superior alternative.