Mango plays it safe online
South African Airways recently launched Mango, a budget airline company which will compete head-on with Kulula.com and 1Time.
The new airline’s domain, www.flymango.co.za , was registered by Tradepage, but this is not the only domain that the airline was interested in.
The new airline also purchased domains like gomango.co.za, go-mango.co.za, and fly-mango.co.za which redirects to the main domain, but it is the other registrations which are of more interest.
Along with its standard domains the following less complimentary domains were also registered: neverflymango.com, mangosucks.com, vrotmango.com, rottenmango.com, neverfly-mango.com, mango-sucks.com, vrot-mango.com and rotten-mango.com
These registrations are most likely in preparation for a possible online campaign against the company, similar to the online campaigns in the telecoms arena with domain names like Hellkom.co.za, sentechsucks.co.za and mywirelesssucks.co.za
These kinds of domain name purchases are however nothing new, and before current US president George Bush even started his presidential campaign his political consultants made sure dozens of derogatory domain names such as bushsucks.com and bushblows.com were locked up.
Mango’s main problem in the online arena is however not currently coming from disgruntled customers looking to open a parody website, but rather from a very slow loading website.
It is not clear exactly why the Mango website loads so slowly, but it is certainly not the best way to introduce prospective customers to your service.
A Mango spokesperson did add that the problems online users experience with their website was due to the fact that so many people were trying to access it.
But at the end of the day the reason makes very little difference to the end user who has to twiddle their thumbs whilst waiting to access Mango’s information.
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