They just sent me a 1099, for what was clearly outlined in their TOS at the time of my purchase as a “Sale” for $1. No where in the TOS was any ARV listed, any sweepstakes rules… in fact, the language at the time clearly stated that it was “NOT” a sweepstakes or lottery.

/sigh

As for limiting winners: the t & c always said that there would be a limited number of winners per booking period. (What was it, 500 per day?) They could have set that lower. Doing that, and sticking to the original set up would have been more credible than trying to limit access in other ways. Again, it goes back to the false advertising. They got a lot of free press for 15 minutes/per day on ALL hotels in their inventory, but that is not what they offered in the end.

In any case, I’d recommend that savvy travelers compare prices on LMT to prices obtainable on other sites and through the hotels themselves. I did this when I was trying to participate in the promo–I like to do my research–and I found LMT to be consistently higher priced. I also found that they inflate hotel ratings. Beware 3-stars at LMT!

Best of luck everyone, all you World for a $1 junkies out there!

Yesterday, 2/3, there was no specific time period of 5/10/15 minutes where the promotion was running, as per the terms of the campaign. Instead it was intermittent…where one person would see the deal and call up a friend and say “It’s going on now!” and the friend would try, and the promo would not be running for them… some of the problems were as follows:
1.) People using firefox are no longer seeing videos (which are required to view to get the deal) For some reason it now seems to be I.e. only?
2.) The timer is inconsistent for those who do see it. (There are several reports of completing all text box entries on a page a page with 3 min on the timer, but then after clicking submit and progressing to the next page, the user gets an error message saying that the time is up, or having it go to the next page, and they see that their time is cut short to 15 sedconds.)
3.) For some individuals a room search is showing up as “0 points”? No one knows if this means it’s a free room, it has nothing about points noted in the terms of the campaign…
4.) For some individuals who got to the final confirmation page, there is a security image box with a randomized passcode you have to enter. If you type that code faster than 3 seconds, it flags an error and says that you’ve done it faster than 3 seconds and need to retry. (Sucking up time for you to complete the forms)
5.) For those who saw the videos, many watched the first video, got their $1 search results and still had time ticking on the top of the page when they clicked “Book it”. Unfortunately, they were then taken to a page that said “The contest is finished”.

I, personally, have worked in tech support and community management in the past. They’ve got a blog (which is pretty much instant communication) but are not communicating to people whether they’ve had tech issues, etc. I don’t believe that people are unreasonable about wanting to know the scoop… they do seem to be changing the rules on us without telling us. Last week (well, at least before Thursday), if you went to the site during the time of the correct minutes, you would be presented with a video, watch that, see search results, click book it, watch another video, go to a confirmation page, go to a billing page, go to a final confirmation page and then you’d be done. You had an accurate timer on the top of the page the entire time that you were working against. This week several people didn’t see a video at all, didn’t see a timer at all, got error messages when filling out forms, had time mysteriously run out/shorten, and numerous other problems found here: http://forums.slickdeals.net/showthread.php?t=1127859&page=34

What I would ask is whether Elliott has tried to touch base again with Lauren in LMT marketing now that so many weird and wonky things are happening? It would be great to get visibility into this.

Also – I did want to note that this will be bad PR for them even for folks who HAVE gotten rooms, because they are now telling their friends and family to try, and the rules have changed. Now even someone who DID get the deal will look like a tool for having told their friends and family to try a promotion where the rules keep changing and there seem to be innumerable problems affecting equality for a user to book.

Thanks for looking at my rant Elliott and Elliott.org staff. If you talk to Lauren the marketing lady again, I’d be thrilled to know what she says.

Running the clock after 11pm is unethical, but not running individual 15 minute segments each day is against how they set the rules up. It is just as bad to me as when McDonalds ram the Monopoly contest and didn’t have winning pieces available. For those that say they may have had technical trouble, it is still their responsibility to communicate that to us. They certainly have all of our email addresses and we saw nothing. It’s obvious to me they gave away some 900 rooms earlier than expected and instead of handling the situation with class, they resorted to unfair practices.

LMT was very impressed with the 1700 people in the chat room and the power they held to keep us looking at their site. Let’s show them what those 1700+ people can do when treated unfair.

I will keep trying in hopes that I may be one of the lucky few, but I will say it’s utterly frustrating to see the clock ticking and having to watch a stupid movie telling you what you’re doing.

What date/time did you see “time” of 7.5 mins?
What date/time did you see “time” of 6.5 mins?

Either way, were you able to book a room in that time?