Lady London writes:
Conditions and whether you need a code vary by country. I joined promptly at the start time. Within 10 minutes got a countdown from 5 mins through to 1 minute before being let in to book. It counted down the seconds in my last minute. Then at 40 seconds to being let in to book, suddenly I was at the back of the queue again with about 1 hour to wait. I waited. Waiting time varied and reduced and I never got nearer than about 19 mins again. I kept being pushed back to the end of the queue (over 1 hour) again. To get in early, be told you’ll be let into the booking page, watching it count down to only 40 seconds then this experience…
Either Cathay Pacific was letting “Friends and Family” of staff into the queue in priority over those already waiting, or they were prioritising status as our country instructions were we had to log in before booking. Either way, their queue management was definitely not first come first served like they said.
i researched well and it was a big time waste as only when the queue opened did they also show other conditions and a restricted period to fly. I could adapt my flying date but then this.
Cathay had a friend before this promotion and now they don’t due to the nontransparent way they ran this. Now I’ll book with other airlines first.
Doesn’t sound like Cathay Pacific won a lot of bonus points with this customer.
Mo says:
Waited in queue for 40 minutes, my turn comes up and there was no code anywhere. Only normal paid bookings. What a joke.
Definitely not a happy camper.
rp17 wasn’t successful either:
Literally, after waiting in two 40-min queues I got in but when I went to book there was no discount code anywhere. I even went all the way up to the payment confirmation page for an LAX flight (at the time the other three were noted to full) and nothing… no discount code anywhere. What a waste of time.
And lastly Dee who was also locked out although the reader got to the end where it displayed a price:
BS… never recieved the code and nothing was prompted even with being signed in. Went all the way to the end with the exception of entering my cc # so I wouldn’t be charged the 1500. Seems like no one recieved a code
In fact, I can understand their frustration very well and agree that this promotion wasn’t held in a very transparent or reconcilable fashion.
Nobody knew exactly how the final booking process was supposed to look like. I myself expected to get a discount code even in case you would get one (obviously not with a queue number of 180,000+).
Here is what was described on the promotional page:
Almost immediately it showed that tickets from Boston are gone:
Message last updated: 18:40 PST
All available tickets departing from “BOS” have been exhausted. Tickets departing LAX, JFK and SFO are still available.
In the end, only LAX was supposedly left which would have been fine but that disappeared soon after and the site switched to:
Yeah right. Probably not.
I’m convinced that this electronic live raffle with ominous queue numbers isn’t a great way to distribute promotional tickets like this. What would have been wrong with doing this behind the scenes and then emailing the lucky winners, maybe send a $50 discount code to those who didn’t win?
I have participated in similar campaigns before such as the Discover America promotions where you can buy packages of points. The Hyatt packages were always super popular and I think I was successful ONCE in 5+ yeats of trying to buy some. You constantly had to update the page and eventually the packages were either gone or you got lucky and landed at a payment site.
Conclusion
The Cathay Pacific & HK International Airport free ticket raffle didn’t make many friends as most were unsuccessful in purchasing anything. Usually you hear at least of SOMEONE who was able to get a ticket but in this case my success rate to track someone down is zero.
If you managed to get a ticket, please comment below or send me an email to share your experience.
Personally I don’t hold a particular grudge against CX because of this. After all it would have been an Economy Class ticket to Hong Kong, easily a 14 hour flight. But I don’t like when a company wastes peoples time with a badly designed promotion. They could have done better. A lot better.