Last Thursday, September 21st, 2006, the SNCF (the French railway company) proposed a special promotion because of the 25th anniversary of the TGV (high speed train): from 12:00 they proposed to sell 50.000 train tickets for a single journey within France, no matter what distance, for only 5.
And we knew they did ... as everyone expected just before 12:00 the reserverations website of the SNCF indicated Notre service de réservation de billets est momentanément inaccessible. Nous vous prions de nous en excuser et vous invitons à renouveler votre visite ultérieurement and it also included the webserver error message Too many users ...
The reservation service by phone also almost collapsed under the exceptionally high number of calls and many people who called had to listen to the message en raison d'un grand nombre d'appels, votre demande ne peut aboutir (due to a high number of calls we can unfortunately not answer your call). In the different train stations, especially in Paris, the special offer led to big queues of waiting people (see also this video from AFP at Gare Montparnasse).
The result was that the SNCF has sold 200.000 train tickets for 5 euro (four times what was initially planned) in less than one hour, while the special offer was announced to be available (with the limit of 50.000 tickets) from 12:00 till 0:00!!
It is not the first time that a special offer proposed by SNCF not only gave happy customers: I even wonder whether it's a good idea for the SNCF to propose such special offers, because it again gave a lot of unsatisfied people as well ...
by Thomas Vergouwen
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