Southwest Airlines’ attempt to thank its Facebook friends with a half-price ticket sale backfired when customers were inadvertently billed multiple times for a single flight – they’re not feeling the “luv.”
“No, it wasn’t a hack, it was just a technology glitch in our system” that caused duplicate bookings and billings to customers’ debit and credit cards, Ashley Dillon, a Southwest spokeswoman, said Saturday.
The company became aware of the problem around 5 p.m. Friday, she said, when they experienced website slowdowns and saw that customers were having to repeatedly refresh pages to take advantage of the airlines’ one-day “luv2like” promotion.
The special sale designed to celebrate Southwest’s reaching the 3 million mark in Facebook fans was supposed to give customers who booked flights Friday a 50 percent discount on certain fares.
Instead, hundreds of frustrated would-be fliers wound up posting stories on Facebook about how their credit and debit cards were being repeatedly charged, in some cases 20 or more times for a single flight.
The Associated Press
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