MyTravel's website woes

'Code release' cockup downs booking system

By Kelly Fiveash • Get more from this author

Posted in Telecoms, 2nd November 2007 00:01 GMT

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Thomas Cook sister company MyTravel has been hit by a system upgrade blunder which has knocked out a number of its group websites over the past few days.

It would appear that MyTravel attempted to quietly roll out an update to its servers last weekend.

The cheap package holiday firm sent an email to its customers on Monday admitting that a "code release" had caused a major issue with its backend booking system.

It said: "The problem has been identified and is being worked on as we speak. We hope to have the sites and booking functionality back up and running over the next few hours."

But more than 72 hours after that email was issued to customers, MyTravel is still having problems with some of its web servers.

Anyone hoping to book cheap flights via the firm's MyTravel Lite website are being greeted with a static status page that simply reads:

"In order to make essential maintenance to our booking process, you will be unable to access our website from 8pm on Saturday 27th October until further notice."

We put a call into MyTravel's press office to find out when its services will back up and running.

Unfortunately, despite the lengthy downtime, no one was willing to explain the cockup or tell us when customers can expect normal service to resume. ®

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