On the occasion of the first anniversary of the OUIGO Classic Trains, the SNCF announced the sale this Tuesday of “10,000 tickets at the unique price of 1€, for travel between May 24 and July 5, 2023”. This sale was eagerly awaited by travelers wishing to travel permanently at low prices. A special operation that seems to have been a victim of its own success. Zoom on this new debacle for the SNCF, strongly criticized on Twitter, to the point of arriving in the top trend in the France category…
A series of technical bugs…
While many users were waiting to take advantage of this plan, to the point of having set their alarm clock at 7am, the official opening time of the ticketing service, the OUIGO website doesn’t seem to have been able to cope with the influx. A disaster scenario was reported, as most of the time, on the favorite playground of the disgruntled users of the SNCF. Indeed, totally saturated, it was impossible for a great number of travelers, totally disconcerted, to book their train tickets.
“An internal server error”, as we could read on the error messages. A disappointment to which OUIGO announced “being a victim of its success”, inviting visitors to “renew their attempt to purchase on SNCF Connect or Trainline”. A solution that seems to be “laborious”, as a Tweeter user points out that it is “impossible to find any OUIGO” on these third party sites.
A scenario that recalls that of the record Christmas sale …
Last October, SNCF Connect experienced the same problem, during the marketing of nearly 9 million TGV, OUIGO, and Intercity tickets for the vacation season. This sale was just as eagerly awaited as that of OUIGO, which generated nearly 100,000 connections per minute between 6am and 8am.
It was expected, but the attendance was 10 times higher than last year.
SNCF AT RTL MEDIA
A surge of visits that quickly led to numerous slowdowns and error messages on the site and the SNCF Connect application. A misadventure, nevertheless managed by the railway company, which managed to “not have interrupted any sale” and set up “virtual waiting rooms” going “up to five minutes of waiting”, before being able to finalize their purchase. A solution that will have allowed the group to sell about 30 tickets per second, or 3 TGV per minute… We hope that the same will happen for the current OUIGO offer, which will undoubtedly be an excellent birthday present. With the added bonus of the announcement a few minutes ago of “the addition of 10,000 tickets on several OUIGO Classic Trains”….
