National carrier Gulf Air’s recently announced one night web only ticket sale has seen unprecedented success with its ticket sales witnessing a 14-fold jump in just 12 hours.
Gulf Air announced a 12 hour, web-only ticket sale that began at 8 pm on 14 June ending at 8 am on 15 June in which customers were offered a 25% discount on all Gulf Air flights across the airline’s 43 destinations at the airline’s website gulfair.com. Within that period of time customers were able to book tickets for travel anytime up to 11 months from the date of purchase of tickets.
The promotion was announced only through popular social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter and individual e-mails to Gulf Air’s Frequent Flyer members and gulfair.com newsletter subscribers.
Says Gulf Air Senior Manager e-Commerce Mr. Nicola Simionato, who spearheaded the unique viral promotion, “We generated an entirely new demand with this promotion. We sold 14 times more than normal with peaks close to 20 times in the first couple of hours. The huge followers and fans of Gulf Air at Facebook and Twitter were able to grab the unique offer as they were the very first to know about the promotion.”
“It has proved that internet communication channels are getting mature fast and people are getting more web-savvy these days. In addition, this also showed that social media are gaining popularity by the day as more and more people are embracing this web-network.”
The promotion saw the highest number of bookings in Bahrain followed by Kuwait, Doha, Dubai, London and other places.
Gulf Air is already voted the no.1 airline in the Gulf region at twitter.com by a number of followers and also has thousands of fans at facebook.com.