The extremely small chances of scoring a FlySafair ticket for R9

Around 1 in every 100 visitors to FlySafair’s website could buy tickets for R9 during the airline’s Lucky Sale on Wednesday, 3 May 2023.

FlySafair first launched its big annual sale in 2015, offering a limited number of tickets for R1.

The promotional ticket price has increased by R1 every year.

It temporarily suspended the sale in 2020 and 2021, when the Covid-19 pandemic severely disrupted airline operations.

The sale returned in 2022 when FlySafair sold 31,713 tickets for R8 each to 1,225,828 people who tried their luck.

During this year’s Lucky R9 Sale, the airline recorded 1,425,378 visitors queuing in the “waiting room” on its website.

The sale basically works like a lottery — with a random batch of users granted access from a waiting room every 10 minutes for their chance to buy tickets.

Being first on the website does not guarantee that you get a ticket.

FlySafair Lucky R9 Sale waiting room

FlySafair chief marketing officer Kirby Gordon said the airline was pleased with how the sale went.

“Our website handled record volumes of traffic this year, and sales rolled through without hassle,” said Kirby.

MyBroadband did experience some issues with a “Not Valid URL” message, but this was fixed by reloading the page.

The sale started at 09:00, and the final ticket was sold at 13:50, about five hours later.

At peak demand, FlySafair said it processed record sales of 492 tickets per minute, compared to 195 tickets last year.

Out of the more than 1.4 million people in the waiting room this year, 50,372 tickets were bought across 16,487 individual bookings.

If each successful booking represented a single customer, that means only 1.16% of visitors were able to buy a ticket during the sale.

Stated another way, the odds of getting a ticket were roughly 86:1.

For poker fans, that is less than half the chance you would have of getting a Full House in Texas hold-em.

With a probability of 2.6%, it is the fourth-rarest hand in poker, bested only by the Royal Flush, Straight Flush, and Four of a Kind.

A Full House poker hand consists of three cards of the same rank and two other cards of the same rank. For example, three 7’s and two 3’s.

During last year’s Crazy R8 Sale, MyBroadband calculated the chances of getting a ticket was around 1.87%, a bit higher this year.

However, that was based on the best-case scenario that only one ticket was sold to each customer, so the actual chance was likely lower.

Despite the odds being stacked against eager travellers, FlySafair has sold over 150,000 tickets in the sale over the past seven years.

For the first time, FlySafair offered a fare finder tool in the waiting room to make it easier for potential lucky buyers to see which dates and destinations had R9 tickets available.

“The R9 ticket finder tool alone handled 102 million requests during the sale,” said Gordon.

When MyBroadband accessed the website at the start of the sale, the highest number of tickets available for a single date on a single route was ten.

The R9 tickets were available on FlySafair’s domestic route network, which includes flights to and from Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban, George, Port Elizabeth, Bloemfontein, and East London.

FlySafair said most tickets were sold on flights between Johannesburg and Cape Town, and between Johannesburg and Durban.

Although most shoppers tried to buy tickets from mobile and desktop devices, FlySafair also recorded 479 visits from gaming consoles and 3,100 from smart TVs.

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