R10 FlySafair tickets a hit

FlySafair’s R10 ticket sale was a tremendous success, with over 1.7 million unique devices logging on to try to get a discount ticket.

The airline offered deep discounts on domestic flight tickets between multiple routes to celebrate its birthday this week.

In this year’s 10th birthday sale, 50,000 tickets were available at R10 each between 09:00 and 18:00 on Wednesday, 8 May 2024.

As in previous years, interested users were directed to a waiting room page where they were assigned a unique device ID for every computer, smartphone, tablet, or other device on which they opened the FlySafair website.

The system would then randomly pick device IDs to let through to the booking site at certain intervals, giving users an opportunity to secure a R10 ticket.

FlySafair provided a calendar on the waiting page, which showed how many tickets were available on certain dates and on what flights, allowing users to be prepared if they are let through.

FlySafair chief marketing officer Kirby Gordon told MyBroadband that the FlySafair website recorded 1,713,980 unique device IDs in the waiting room during the sale, which took place from 09:00 until 18:00.

16,000 devices managed to get through the waiting room and make bookings for R10 tickets, working out to about 0.94% of the devices.

With each device having bought an average of roughly three tickets and many users trying their luck with multiple devices, the chance of getting a ticket was actually even lower than that.

It can’t be, I’m here with 11 computers

No 😭😭😭#Flysafair pic.twitter.com/zdj4xdH2Fw

— Gu$tavo The Alkaline Kid (@Gustavo_GTAK) May 8, 2024

The chances to secure a bargain ticket this year were slightly lower than in 2023.

Bookings for the R9 tickets were made from 16,487 devices out of 1.4 million that had waited, working out to 1.16% of the website’s visiting devices during that sale.

Gordon said the earliest a person got through to the sale was five minutes after it started. The sale was called at 18:00, but a few seats remained at R10. The last appears to have been bought just after 21:00 on Wednesday.

Gordon also provided more details on the limits FlySafair imposed to prevent people from buying tickets in bulk.

“There is a limit of 14 seats per transaction on the site but there were almost never that many loaded per flight,” he said.

“If you search for a number of seats flight on the site, the API returns the lowest price point in which the full order can be accommodated.”

“If there was one R10 seat on a flight but you were searching for three people, you would not see the R10 flight, you’d get the next-best price point.

“As a result, people could not buy stacks and stacks of the R10 seats in one go.”

Gordon said the final number of seats sold will be confirmed later on Thursday because some people opted for the pay later function on the site.

“They have 24 hours to finalise their bookings, which will give us a final idea of the number,” he said.