Originally Posted by
HarbourGent
In itself, that has a reputational impact on CX they should consider when running price lotteries.
Price lotteries are awfully hard to run in HK:
Online first come first served: Do it more than once and techies start writing bots to lock in takings and lock everyone else out (iReserve for iPhones)
Bricks and mortar first come first served: you create employment opportunities for the informal labour force in HK (the "South Asian" complaint with Sammi Touch Mi tickets).
Not to mention you keep seeing "concert producers" having insider supply of tickets <-- unfortunately this does seem to be borne out in fact because I have been offered access to some of these.
Either way, you favour people who are "available" over those who are not.
iBonds - subscribers get a subscription period, those who apply get equal allotment per HKID <-- probably the fairest, but very unexciting from a retail point of view. Also locks out foreigners and Mainlanders, argurably unfair.
There's already a factor going for CX that doesn't exist for iReserve or concert sellers - the tix are not transferable and there's a ID check at gate, so there aren't professional scalpers/traders getting into the act here.
Originally Posted by
HarbourGent
But as I see it the main causes of complaint are substantive, viz.:
1. Cathay made a specific commitment about when the tickets would become available and then released them early, apparently.
I think this happened but I think it was irrelevant because access restrictions were initially effective.
Has anyone actually seen a fanfare ticket issued before 8am? I haven't.
Originally Posted by
HarbourGent
2. The queue was in fact not a queue in that there was no order of precedence. Again, this would have been less a problem had it been clearly communicated.
They didn't say first-come first-served either. It's a rather Hongkie expectation to presume it.
Originally Posted by
HarbourGent
3. People were held in “queues” for hours for no reason. As per a normal booking with limited inventory, there is no clear reason why they could not have been told as they went through the process whether tickets were still available.
I was mildly confused by this too. Only after the first destination/time combination for Sydney was sold out did I realise the system was deliberately selling tickets slowly.
Originally Posted by
HarbourGent
It’s a small point, but I also find it tasteless and immature to tell people they have to hurry up with their credit card when you have held them in a wait for hours.
It was relevant when we all got in under the hidden-pages URL hack! But I don't think CX had this in mind when they wrote the message.
Originally Posted by
HarbourGent
That some people “hacked” the process is not to my mind Cathay’s fault, although if their I.T. was better run and the pointless queue referred to above didn’t exist this would have been less likely to happen.
I disagree. The ease of the hack, after all the work that was done to try and slow and randomise the sales up front was embarassing. I agree with SCMP it's not even illegal, just embarassingly simple.
Originally Posted by
HarbourGent
Whatever their marketing objective, CX holds itself up as a premium company offering excellent service and a shambles like this does not burnish that image at all.
Yes. I too wonder what's CX trying to achieve with this? Jetstar HK's truly dead and buried - QF is bleeding all over. I don't know how CX expects to boost business (excuse the pun) with this - we'd all get so worked up we book a J tix when we fail to get the $100 tix?