The Leading Hotels of the World Led Astray by Mismanagement of their 1928 Promotion

Who wouldn’t want to stay a couple nights at a luxurious hotel for a mere $19.28 a night? Heck, I’d pay for one, stay for weekend at some remote location in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and then recline in luxury I could otherwise never afford.

LHW sent a nice, elegant email.  $19.28?  How could I lose?

The Leading Hotels of the World—indeed, very clear corporate branding—launched a worldwide promotion. To celebrate 80 years in the luxury hotel biz, they offered any Joe Schmoe out there the opportunity to purchase a stay in any of their participating hotels for just $19.28. They were originally established in 1928, hence the somewhat unusually pricing scheme (at least it isn’t $1928.00 per night). After free media publicity, hundreds of thousands of pre-registrants, and the bait of $19.28 for luxury, they failed. They utterly, truly failed. Talk about a PR and IT nightmare.

The promotion was supposed to officially start 8am EST and open to online users across the world. I actually woke up 4:30am PST to exert my feeble attempt to secure a room somewhere, anywhere. Even before the online doors were open, their site was down. After just a couple minutes, I gave up and went back to sleep, dreaming of brighter hours ahead with Los Angeles freeway traffic and angry commuters.

But apparently, I wasn’t alone. They sent an apology letter to every single pre-registrant and published a press release explaining why they couldn’t fulfill the needs of their hawkeyed deal seekers.

LTW’s IT infrastructure just couldn’t handle the traffic (big surprise). You would think that LTW would set an official deadline for pre-registration, give their IT and eCommerce infrastructure enough time to prepare for the huge spike in traffic, and then officially unveil their promo site at specified time (give or take). Instead, they had a hungry mob outside their virtual gates waiting to ransack them at huge cost to everyone else and to their reputation.

LHW were virtually giving their hotel rooms away, but somehow they didn’t have the foresight to boost their infrastructure to handle all the queries. After sending out an online form for customers to fill out and send back to LHW, they sent another email out voiding the forms altogether and have officially postponed their promotion indefinitely. Bummer.

This is a lesson in poor planning and scaling. They’re looking to remedy the situation as best as possible, but their online customer satisfaction will likely tank in the mean time, especially those who have never heard of LHW until the fiasco earlier this week.

Once they get their act together, I’m willing to fight other data packets to get, quite possibly, the deal of the century. But when a commerce site offers the next “deal of the century,” they need to keep in mind that bandwidth and traffic will always be a limiting factor. Just picture thousands of people waiting at Best Buy to purchase a $10 laptop; retail or online, it’s going to be incredibly difficult to accommodate that many people and users without a fair plan in place.

LHW also generated enough buzz to increase awareness of their brand. I’ve never heard of LHW till I got wind of the promotion. And I’m sure thousands of their pre-registrants haven’t either. Given the power of online commerce, online marketing, and online word-of-mouth, they’ve got the emails and interest they wanted. And I’m sure they’ll find a much better way to handle all the orders and inquiries. But if you can’t deliver on the buzz, then you run the risk of hurting your brand. While you may get massive sales, but problematic infrastructure issues, you may end up with a hit or miss campaign.

By all means, satisfy the needs of the customer first. Any disaster like this can lessen the impact for a customer if there is direct communication, many apologies, and incentives for the customer to continue business with you. A company blog is one way for informal communication, but send out emails, use forums, and online media outlets to get the word out. At the very least, you will get the feeling they’re trying to woo you back. In a competitive online marketplace, that’s a must.

Don’t worry LHW, you’re not alone. But by all means, give me a couple free rooms and all is forgiven.

I’m joking.

Sort of.