After years of “win a house” competitions never reaching the required number of tickets, could it be that the Oldborough Retreat Devon Estate competition will become the first to complete? As of today (15th September) the tickets sold allocation is 45006 – leaving just under 1000 tickets remaining. At £25 a ticket the competition will have brought in £1.15 million for Brian and Wendy Wilshaw if it reaches the magical 46000 tickets sold. However, over on the official website there’s news that the competition has been “suspended until Monday”. The reason for the suspension they say is that there’s “only around a thousand tickets left (45,000 sold so far) – and they just want to make sure that we don’t over-sell the remaining tickets”. This does seem a strange move as surely some kind of mechanism was put in place that said “if ticket number > 46,000 don’t sell any more tickets”?
Spam Filters Are Blocking Emails
The decision to pause things has caused some annoyance over on the couple’s MySpace Blog where it’s alleged that some comments regarding Sunday’s decision to suspend entries whilst the technical issues were sorted have been deleted. The Wilshaw’s also claim the suspension is due to “certain Spam filters are blocking the entry number emails getting through”. However surely the emails are sent after a ticket has been purchased making this claim totally irrelevant? All is required is an option to resend confirmation emails!
Cause For Concern?
At the moment we’d say no! It may well be that the techies behind the site didn’t put in features required to cope with the competition completing. However, we’ll be keeping an eye on the Oldborough Retreat Devon Estate to see when the suspension is lifted and what happens if and when all the 46000 tickets have been sold! Update – The competition is now back running and there are just 288 tickets left!