Surprise! You've turned Gold!

[Rae]

My last name starts with T and I got the retraction email on the same day. Me thinks you got an actual comp to Gold?

Nah - I'm still red according to my account. Must have just been missed in the millions that were sent out. Shame really, I think they would have stolen some business from Qantas for sure.

 

[thewinchester]

The dangerous slippery-slide has begun. What other half-coughed quick fixes will be put into place?

Agreed, like match to touch paper this one. Its going to be fun to stand back and watch it go pear shaped.

 

[bambbbam2]

m discussing what compensation they will grant

'Compensation' and 'Damages' to me should be offered if the customer has suffered some kind of loss.

What damage/loss did it cause anyone at all? 'Oh, it got my hopes up'. Sorry doesn't qualify IMO.

 

[sampson]

I fell off my chair and hurt my wallet. Does that count????

gottasay, I just opened a letter asking if I want to cancel my Qantas/Amex Card. The first thought was about being just a red pleb on virgin.

 

[Will]

Fairfax has picked it up:

Virgin Blue has been forced to apologise to customers of its loyalty reward program after sending out an email upgrading their membership to 'gold' class, only to cancel it three hours later.

From Virgin Blue's Velocity Gold Status email mistake

They quote a spokesman as attributing the error to a 'processing error'.

Reasonably balanced article.

 

[sampson]

Casual flyers like me can pop into the lounge for $35?

 

[oz_mark]

Casual flyers like me can pop into the lounge for $35?

Single entry passes can be purchased online for $30, or for $35 at The Lounge reception on day of travel.

 

[gem gem]

Yes, I also received this email, then 4 hours later received another email stating -

Oops! Due to an error you've received our previous email by mistake. Please disregard the free upgrade communication as unfortunately you do not qualify for that upgrade.
We apologise for any inconvenience caused

 

[odysseus]

I'd say it's an IT issue. Someone (maybe in Marketing/Retention) decided that a select number of people should be offered this promo. Whoever put together the data filtering (or perhaps whoever put together the mass email app, or whoever extracted the data to send to the organisation that would do the bulk mailing) failed. I suspect that's probably someone in IT. Or perhaps an extract of the entire 2m member database was handed over to someone in marketing, and they failed to send in the filtered list to the bulk mailer.

The campaign is driven by Marketing (rather than being something IT e.g. software upgrade). I'm yet to see a business area just put blind faith in another area with such a project. Any reasonable management would have done the test extract of data first to verify the numbers being extracted as well as the quality of the sample, not just hand it over to IT saying, 'here's the text and send it to these customers, over to you.'

The latter may happen if Marketing did the extract themselves and didn't QA it properly, but that gets back to my original point that it sounds like a marketing stuff-up.

If it is the case that Marketing did entirely hand the job over to IT and there was no validation, review or sign-off once passing the requirements, then that indicates major business process failings rather than just a one-off event - as bad as it was.

 

[wallacej]

I am sure at one point in our lives we have pressed the send button and wished we had not.... I am guessing this is one of those times for the poor bugger that pressed the button to send, really wish they had not. This thread certainly got a great run though

 

[Mal]

This thread certainly got a great run though

... and it's not over yet!

 

[Lonely Flyer]

... and it's not over yet!

What do you mean?

 

[Mal]

What do you mean?

Everything has not yet been finalised. People are still bleating like sheep on Twitter and all sorts of social networking sites. News articles are still being written. The saga is not over yet.

Oh and if people were wanting to complain to the ACCC about deceptive conduct or whatever, they'll apparently listen - then most likely ignore your complaint:

Virgin Blue's Velocity Gold Status email mistake

A spokeswoman for the the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission said the consumer watchdog was unlikely to take any action against Virgin Blue.

"‘In this case it is unlikely to cause significant consumer detriment and we’d be unlikely to take action particularly as they moved to rectify it quickly," the spokeswoman said.

But consumers who wanted to take the matter further could either complain to the airline or could contact the ACCC's information line on 1300 302 502, she said.

"These things are always looked at on a case-by-case basis," she said.

 

[ejb]

What do you mean?

That this like the AMEX thread will have people speculating for weeks over what they can grab/extract from DJ.

I got the email, deleted it as I never fly DJ and then got the oops email and deleted that, cost to me 5 seconds. DJ, you owe me nothing.

ejb

 

[anat0l]

That this like the AMEX thread will have people speculating for weeks over what they can grab/extract from DJ.

And if it is like the Amex thread, we'll also see a plethora of superfluous posts - usually to repost something that has been stated ad nauseum - a lot of mud slinging (usually begging the question), and basically an excuse for all participants to boost their post counts :mrgreen:

 

[sampson]

Single entry passes can be purchased online for $30, or for $35 at The Lounge reception on day of travel.

Thanks. I had no idea. I always thought these lounges were pricey luxuries for people in business and first class.

 

[Mal]

Thanks. I had no idea. I always thought these lounges were pricey luxuries for people in business and first class.

And also accessible through the PriorityPass (Airport Lounge Access Worldwide | Priority Pass ) scheme.

 

[pauly7]

I couldn't care less about the mistake but it is interesting to watch how it is being handled....

Firstly I think DJ could do really well with a properly targetted comp match - clearly there are a heap of people on here, including myself that would give them a second/third chance with something clever like that. I must admit when I first got the email I thought it was a great move after some pretty lame marketing and even lamer offers/comps that just copied QF's lame offers/comps the last few years.

Secondly, its interesting that crazydave hasn't commented here yet... in the past he's been happy to post negative news articles very quickly against DJ's competitors.... (e.g. Tiger) but I would have thought it would have been a good idea to get a spokesperson in places like this pretty quickly to mitigate a pretty big negative discussion and news against DJ.

Having said that DJ may well have gagged him for a while, sometimes in disasters only certain people are allowed to communicate on behalf of the company for consistancy.... Or he could be involved in trying to sory out the mess himself elsewhere and just hasn't made it here yet.

Either way I'm more interested from a technical POV how it happened! We run large DB's all the time and have very strict proceedures... good to hear lessons on how not to!

 

[oz_mark]

While I too am most interested in the "How it happened" angle, I understand that if the lawyers are involved then people may not be in a position to say anything just yet.

 

[JohnK]

I cannot believe this thread is still going.

I think a few people have lost the sense of reality.

Not really. At the very least we should receive a complimentary guess pass (valued at $30) to any Virgin Lounge simply for reading 2 emails.