/ 22 September 2010

What cost a bargain?

I have just spent the better part of the morning booking flights on kulula.com as part of their famous one day flight special which they run periodically. I managed to book a couple of flights between Jo’burg and Cape Town for R399, which is a real bargain.

Clearly thousands, if not tens of thousands of people all had the same idea and the site became painfully slow.

My levels of frustration were compounded by the fact that the site became so slow, the time between booking and payment expired before the page refreshed (OK, this may have also been because I went to make a cup of coffee while waiting for the page to load).

I have been trying to work out if it is worth the time. If one takes a day’s salary and calculates the hourly rate — or in my case as a freelancer the number of words that were not written this morning — would it not have made more financial sense to wait until the following day and pay the extra R400 for the flight and not lose any billing time?

Very possibly, but at the end of the day who can resist a bargain? Hopefully kulula.com will work on their servers to carry this kind of volume in the future and possibly save many computers from being thrown out the window in fustration!

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