• #FlyFwdGiveBack Sale Too Successful, Crashes Virgin America Site

    Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010

    Alexia Tsotsis is the co-editor of TechCrunch. She attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA, majoring in Writing and Art, and moved to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the Media industry. After four years of living in New York and attending courses at New York University, she returned to Los Angeles in... → Learn More

    Twitter and Virgin America have teamed up to bring you a retweetable 24 hour sale, another iteration of @earlybird. Fans of inflight Wifi who commute between San Francisco and Los Angeles (and other relatively urban cities) will be pleased that the discount fares start at $39, with five dollars per #flyfwdgiveback booking going to DonorsChoose.org. Virgin America plans on donating up to$50,000 to the charity by the end of the day.

    The Twitter @earlybird account has had mixed reviews over the past couple of weeks but judging from the deluge of #flyfwdgiveback retweets this morning it looks like a lot more people would rather fly to Las Vegas for $39 than spend $349.99 on a 32-inch Vizio HDTV at Target, free shipping be damned. This is Twitter’s second travel deal (the first one was with JetBlue) but it’s the first with charitable donation.

    And contrary to what the @virginamerica tweet implies, you don’t need to actually retweet the deal to get the discount. Now if only the Virgin America website would stay up.

    The sale runs from 7 a.m. PDT today to 7 a.m. tomorrow for those interested. We’ve contacted Virgin America about the site load problems and have not yet heard back.

    An update from Virgin:


    “Our site has been up since I sent the below, (we experienced about 10 minutes of real slow down, people were still booking throughout that time — but the site was slow). We don’t have early stats to share yet, but based on volume, it is already shaping up to be a record traffic day for us. ”

    Company: Virgin America
    Launch Date: August 2007

    Virgin America is airline that is on a mission to make flying good again — with brand new planes, attractive fares, topnotch service, and a host of fun, innovative amenities that are reinventing domestic air travel. The Virgin America experience is unlike anything else in the domestic skies, with mood-lit cabins, custom-designed leather seats, power outlets, in-flight internet available on every flight, and a video touch-screen and remote control at every seatback that offers guests 25 films, live TV,...

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    Company: Twitter
    Website: twitter.com
    Launch Date: March 21, 2006
    Funding: $1.16B

    Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 (launched publicly in July 2006), is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to post updates 140 characters long. Twitter “is a real-time information network that connects [users] to the latest stories, ideas, opinions, and news.” The service can be accessed through a variety of methods, including Twitter’s website; text messaging; instant messaging; and third-party desktop, mobile, and web applications. Twitter is currently available in...

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