'High traffic issues' on ticket giveaway site: How can Hong Kong Airlines improve user experience?

Hong Kong Airlines has defended itself after consumers expressed their dissatisfaction of having to experience another round of an "endless" wait on its ticket giveaway website on Monday, of which the airline aimed to distribute 9,800 free flight tickets to seven Asian destinations including Seoul and Bangkok.

In a conversation with MARKETING-INTERACTIVE, a spokesperson from HK Airlines explained that due to the overwhelming response from customers, the website experienced high traffic issues initially on the campaign webpage.

“It was quickly recovered and up and running. Most of the tickets have been distributed since we opened the channel at 10 am yesterday,” the statement read.

This came after netizens took to HK Airlines’ Facebook to express disappointment with the user-unfriendly system, which consistently displays error messages and results in long waiting times. Several users shared screenshots depicting a "504 Gateway Time-out" error, a check by MARKETING-INTERACTIVE saw.

MARKETING-INTERACTIVE also tried logging into the system to queue for the tickets from 10am on Monday but was repeatedly kicked out and redirected to the main home page. The company then announced on Facebook at 4.05pm that flights to Seoul and Nagoya were all distributed.

The incident has in fact drawn mixed reactions over the past week as media intelligence firm CARMA saw over 4,000 mentions specifically related to Hong Kong Airlines, with the majority of them centered around the ongoing giveaway campaign. Among these mentions, approximately 23% have been negative, while 9.5% have been positive.

Will this impact HK Airlines’ brand image? 

In fact, this is not the first time HongKongers experienced technical issues on the carrier’s ticket giveaway campaign website. However, the first appearance of a "504 Gateway Time-out" error on the website seemed to have raised consumers’ anger on the overall user experience.

Industry players MARKETING-INTERACTIVE spoke to weighed in on whether this will impact the carriage’s reputation. David Ko, managing director of RFI Asia said HK Airlines’ lack of apology was a mistake that worsened the PR issue. He added:

By failing to acknowledge the problem and express regret, it showed indifference to the customers who were frustrated by the website issues.

A good apology should include an explanation of why the problem occurred, what actions are being taken to prevent it from happening again, and how the customers will be compensated or rewarded for their inconvenience, he said. “HK Airlines did not provide any of these elements, which may make it seem arrogant. In this age of transparency, consumers demand almost radical transparency so that brands can earn their trust.”

On the other hand, supply and demand imbalance are part of the main factors that led to the negative sentiments from netizens, said Celine Cheung, account director, RSVP Communications. However, she believed this won’t do much harm to the airline’s image and stop people from getting free tickets from its website in the future.

She added:

As a budget airline, HK Airline's positioning is not a ‘prestige experience’ but a price-first choice. This matter should not have much impact on HK airline business and image, I believe.

Scaling up capacity to cope with high user traffic

Despite technical errors being a common issue when a website comes across a huge amount of traffic at the same time, there are ways to avoid a website traffic jam and improve the user experience.

With modern cloud services today, scaling up capacity to meet spikes in user traffic is a straightforward condition for the IT team to meet, RFI Asia’s Ko said. He added:

Additionally, the airline could use social media and other channels to communicate with its customers and update them on the progress of the campaign and the resolution of the issues.

Furthermore, he said it could offer some additional a lucky draw for free tickets, or discounts to the customers who were affected by the website issues, or extend the duration of the giveaway campaign to give more people a chance to participate.

On the technical front, Francis Fong, honorary president of the Hong Kong Information Technology Federation said the IT department of the company should enhance the quality of the queuing system and allow it to accommodate more people in line.

By improving the system, participants could avoid disconnection to the website and the average time for queuing can be shortened.

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