Virgin Australia "Milestone Announcement" June 1, 2023

[33kft]

After queuing for 6 hours, they walked away with a MEL-OOL flight. Pretty sure I wouldn't have had that sort of patience!

Well done to them. Compared to that, the flight will feel quick

 

[jayphi]

Yep, I can see Virgin having more disgruntled members than happy ones from this promotion.
There’s a thread on OzBargain about the Melbourne pop up store operating yesterday. Earliest caller was there 24 hours before opening.

The only ones who will ever get these '1 point rewards' will be the ones smart enough to set-up the inventory/stock bots using code that runs 24/7 pinging the VFF website. For all others, easier just to refer to them as 'No Point' Rewards.

 

[RooFlyer]

Yep, I can see Virgin having more disgruntled members than happy ones from this promotion.

Geez, no-one is forced to participate! If they go to the venue and see a huge queue, you have another choice whether to stay or to bug out fast.

 

[jayphi]

Geez, no-one is forced to participate! If they go to the venue and see a huge queue, you have another choice whether to stay or to bug out fast.

Very true and I would wager many users on this forum would fall into that category - or wouldn’t even bother trying in the first place.

There are others though. You need only look at the comments on Facebook about the pop up store. Many of them negative and wondering “what about [insert town name], when will we get one”

Then it’ll be website crashes when the one point items hit the rewards store.

The velocity team know it’s not about getting a bargain, it’s about the opportunity to get a bargain. But what they don’t seem to have a good grasp of (or simply don’t care/think the risk is worth it) is when that opportunity is lost or perceived to be taken away, that’s when punters get grumpy.

 

[jase05]

Yep, I can see Virgin having more disgruntled members than happy ones from this promotion.

How so?
No one is forcing people to line up that early.
No different to the people who sleep out the front of Myer, DJ’s etc for Boxing Day sales.
It’s not something I’d ever do but each to their own

 

[MEL_Traveller]

How so?
No one is forcing people to line up that early.
No different to the people who sleep out the front of Myer, DJ’s etc for Boxing Day sales.
It’s not something I’d ever do but each to their own

The whole ‘we’ll release the 1 point rewards on line at random’ is fairly frustrating. Regular checking of the rewards store only yields non 1 point rewards. So yeah… not the best promo as far as I’m concerned.

 

[Saab34]

As above, bots are generally an issue with these promos.

Many online retailers had all sorts of issues during the pandemic especially with PS5s, bots gobbled up the stock in a matter of seconds.

 

[Mattg]

The velocity team know it’s not about getting a bargain, it’s about the opportunity to get a bargain. But what they don’t seem to have a good grasp of (or simply don’t care/think the risk is worth it) is when that opportunity is lost or perceived to be taken away, that’s when punters get grumpy.

I figured the main purpose of this was to get headlines. It's a PR stunt, after all.

 

[Saab34]

1 point is live but system didn’t even last a second and crashed.

 

[MattA]

First drop going well then…

 

[Saab34]

With thousands of people F5’n (plus me lol) the heck out of the website fair to say the system will never cope.

 

[Zanzaid]

Hard to imagine how else they saw this playing out?

 

[Saab34]

buuuuuuuuut

velocity means fassssst!?

 

[CaptainCurtis]

buuuuuuuuut

velocity means fassssst!?

Buuttt its ooohhhh sooooo slllloooooowwwwww

 

[Saab34]

Lol.

Who remembers those Jetstar 1c gimmicks back in the day. The site barely lasted a second.

 

[33kft]

I am not sure the messaging is doing them any favours

 

[CaptainCurtis]

This seems to be more about a play for new members (in prep for their IPO) than actually anything substantive.

This is the only answer to this chaos. The Velocity instagram page had ~29k followers this morning, now up to 31.8k.

 

[MJHoops]

I thought I’d hit the jackpot as the mobile site showed me a bunch of 1 pt rewards including flights (2x return to Bali economy for example) about 5 minutes ago
But as soon as I clicked a reward I got the “system maintenance” page

 

[Saab34]

You can’t even login at the moment and it appears nobody else can either.
I added the flight to cart then when you go to login you get a 502 error

 

[konvul]

I wonder what's going to happen, clearly IT hasn't got their stuff together...