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. “