The problem
January 2015. LAN Airlines was launching its annual promotion ‘2X — un viaje que nos une’: tickets to Europe, the Caribbean, and North America at the price of one for two people. Cabeza, the agency handling the digital account, needed a site and a Facebook app that could capture massive sign-ups in just a few days — and withstand what was going to be a real avalanche. One of the largest airlines in South America announcing discounts at the height of the tourist season. The system simply could not go down.
What we did
We built the entire flow in Laravel: landing page, form with RUT and passport validation, companion selector, destination selector, and confirmation. The piece lived simultaneously at 2xdelan.com and inside a Facebook app, with built-in virality — every sign-up generated its own shareable link that pulled friends into the flow. Behind it, DigitalOcean with Laravel Forge and MySQL. When the avalanche hit — 643 concurrent users at 6:00 PM on Monday, 1,805 at 9:40 PM — we scaled the servers live. Tuesday's 3:00 PM peak marked 2,580 simultaneous users and 10 sign-ups per second, with no downtime.
The outcome
In 5 days the campaign accumulated 1,940,648 page views, 491,648 unique visits, and 191,219 real sweepstakes sign-ups. 81% of the traffic came from mobile, 75% were women, and 80% were between 18 and 34 years old. Punta Cana, Miami, and Madrid were the most chosen destinations (89K, 66K, and 57K entries). LAN renewed with Cabeza for the following campaigns; we stayed on as technical partner for the account's digital activations through 2015 and 2016.
