The website hosting the Victorian Government’s regional travel voucher scheme has crashed shortly after the first of the $200 vouchers were set to become available to the public.
The scheme, designed to kickstart Victoria’s tourism industry which has struggled through recent bushfires and the pandemic, sees 120,000 travel vouchers on offer for accommodation, tours and attractions in regional Victoria.
However the Business Victoria website, where would-be tourists were directed to redeem their vouchers, was returning a server error at 10am for many users.
The outage is thought to have been caused by the massive spike in users attempting to get their hands on one of the 40,000 vouchers being made available in the first round of the campaign.
Users have reported an array of different errors as they have tried to book their subsidised holidays. While some were greeted with the “Internal Server Error” others’ pages loaded only to have the all-important “apply now” button completely missing from the page.
Frustrated users have taken to Twitter to share their experience with the process.
@businessvic No Apply Now button Regional Travel voucher, webiste crashed pic.twitter.com/OoN9hRQ6E6
— dhruv sachdeva (@dhruvsachdeva30) December 10, 2020
Ok so finally get through and then click next and I get booted out 🤷♂️😖 #ApplyNow #TravelVoucher #VicPOL #VicGov #VicTravelScheme pic.twitter.com/6iUaPOLQnQ
— Leon Sjogren (@Leonsjogren) December 10, 2020
Others imagined what life might be like with that elusive “Apply Now” button…
Im actually pretty excited to see what the apply now button will look like after refreshing for 35 minutes and thinking about it non stop. #TravelVoucher
— ❤️🖤 Simon Eddy (@SimonEddy32) December 10, 2020
