Why RM123?
In the first few months of AirAsia, we experimented with a 2000-seat sale. At that time, we were still in our original corporate colours of blue and green, with two aircraft flying a full-service operation.
The campaign came to be earlier than anticipated, and here’s what triggered it:
While the flight booking system showed full loads on our Langkawi route, our pilots reported that our flights were not full!
It was still early days, and remodeling of our low-cost, no-frills operations have yet to begin. We came up with a route-specific campaign to sell those seats on our daily flight to Langkawi.
Overall, 2000 seats were allocated, and we wanted to keep it as simple as 1,2,3:
1: Easy to book
2: Easy to pay
3: Easy to fly
Thus, the one-way fare was priced at RM123.
When the advertisement hit the newspapers, the telephones rang so frequently that our router crashed; and the snake-like queue at the ticket counters (back then, we still issued classic paper air tickets) lasted for days! To top it off, a few days later, one of our 2 aircraft – 9M-AAB (Alpha Alpha Bravo) – had a bird strike in Kuching! We did not quite know what hit us then, but that’s a story for another day…
See the collection here.