Win Jet Blue Tickets on eBay!
eBay boasts its share of bizarre and entertaining auctions. Remember the guy from Nebraska who sold advertising space on his forehead to the highest bidder? Or what about the guy who sold his wisdom teeth for $20?
eBay is a thriving marketplace for buyers and sellers that would like to take part in a transaction for almost anything in the world. On September 8th, Jet Blue hopped on the bandwagon by posting 300 round trip airline tickets on eBay. The tickets were fixed routes and dates, starting at $0.05 cents. Jet Blue relied solely on the competitive nature of the ‘bidding wars’ on eBay to raise the ticket prices up closer to fair market prices.
The tickets were snatched up quickly by bidders, and on average people paid 40% less than going rates on the airline’s site. The better metric for Jet Blue’s success was in the publicity it generated (including this post!) and the consequent traffic they received on their site. The auction drove 135,000 curious people to the site to find out more about the promotion, which also included a number of tickets to ‘mystery destinations’ that were not revealed until the bids ended.
Hats off to Jet Blue for using a creative new medium to push ticket purchases in a seasonably low time of the year for sales. I think this could be an interesting new distribution channel for hotels in particular since their inventory is more predictable and the overhead is less of an issue.
