Planning to celebrate the first anniversary of its inter-island service, go! offered 1,000 seats at $1 one-way, only to frustrate travelers as its reservations system shut down for eight hours within minutes of the booking availability. The Honolulu Star Bulletin reported Sabre, which runs its booking engine, did not have enough capacity to handle the more than 20,000 hits to its web site to the point where go! extended the sale for an additional five hours beyond the 12-hour deadline and added an additional 1,000 seats to the sale capacity. Its phone and email accounts were similarly flooded. Aloha and Hawaiian, who have added a ton of capacity in the market since go!’s, a Mesa (MESA) subsidiary, debut, did not match the sale. Sabre’s GetThere brand added capacity to solve the problem. Customers could get to the carrier’s web site but received an error message when they tried to book a flight.
Aloha charged that go! is desperate, but the Bulletin pointed out that Aloha gave away 1,000 tickets while go! was offering $19 inaugural fares. Mesa  CEO Jonathan Ornstein told the newspaper, "If this is desperate, I'd love to be as desperate as Ryanair, which sells 20 percent of its seats for free and is the most successful airline in the world. You've got old, stodgy managements that don't know how to react to a more vibrant and more creative approach. The people in Hawaii have not forgotten the days of the $100 fares before we got here and asking for loyalty now rings hollow."
go! has gained an additional 13,000 frequent flier members in the last month alone to the 34,000 it logged in its first year of operation, according to CFO Peter Murnane, who spoke before the Merrill Lynch Global Airline Conference last week. He also reported that the company has hired additional marketing professionals to beef up its marketing presence in the inter-island market.