Varsity Trip booking chaos: Site crashes within minutes of launch

Those looking to book a place on this year’s Varsity Ski Trip this morning found out the true horrors of when a weak system becomes overloaded.

The Varsity booking site, hosted by travel provider NUCO Travel crashed within minutes of its 8am launch leaving most who tried to book their trip fruitlessly refreshing the page for over an hour.

NUCO then closed down the page for maintenance leaving thousands unsure of when they will be able to book or whether places remain.

bollocks

The early morning bookers found themselves stuck on a number of different pages including the “initiating server”, “loading seasonal data” and (ominous sounding) “reticulating splines” pages, as well as seeing numerous “Server Error” messages during the option selection and payment process.

This was followed by total collapse initiated by NUCO in an attempt to fix the site to allow those still seeking places a chance to get one on the increasingly unusable site.

NUCO getting their shit together

The collapse of the booking system has led to irate phone calls by students to the booking agent, angry responses on the Varsity Trip’s Facebook page, as well as across numerous college booking groups.

One angry Balliol student

An irate Keble second year complained: “A trillion people a second use Facebook and it doesn’t crash, and they have 5000 people trying to use theirs and it’s getting all pissy”.

An equally angry second year Somervillian said: “NUCO, I’ll initialise your Mum”.

lies

Those who managed to get into the system found the options for selecting flights, ski hire and tickets to events became unresponsive and required repeat selection to go through.

There was also confusion over the booking and payment sections, with a fraught Christ Church second year seeing an email confirmation of payment at the same time as NUCO was asking her to enter payment details.

An obviously exasperated Balliol Second Year told The Tab: “You would’ve thought they’d learn from last year – I’m fairly sure if The Tab ran a ski trip, they would do it better, and I hate the Tab”.

just what everyone wants to see at 8.01AM

At 9:23am NUCO then shut the site and announced to college reps it will go live again at 6pm, with pre-booked upgraded accommodation valid until 8pm. Any updates will be posted here as they unfold.

Booking went live again mid afternoon, the trip is now sold out.