Earlier last week, I found out about a contest that Torontoist was running in conjunction with Virgin America (these are the people that operate an airline). They were offering a contest to win some flights to SF by submitting a 3-day vacation itinerary with the hottest underground spots in Toronto. The flights didn’t catch my eye, but there 4 secondary prizes of tickets to a Broken Social Scene concert, so I figured why not and entered.

Guess what? I didn’t win. But that’s not what this blog is about. I filled out a itinerary. I didn’t spend a lot of effort doing it, and just put a bunch of common 2^nd tier tourist attracitions plus a couple of suggestions from my own Visiting Toronto blog. I thought that it was going to be a lottery; but after I received an email saying that my entry was now online. I read a bit more about the contest.

It wasn’t a lottery, which was sad because there were only 17 total applicants! It was one of those new grassroots promotions where you have to fan things on Facebook. There goes my chance at winning! But then I read a bit more and found out that the 4 consolation prizes were for 12 tickets to a private BSS concert + 2 return tickets to SF + 2 nights stay at what looks like a boutique hotel + $100 GC to a restaurant + 2 SF City passes. The value was over $6000!

If that was the consolation prize, what the heck was the grand prize? Well it’s basically 5x the consolation prizes. The 10 concert tickets + 10 return tickets to SF + 5 rooms in the hotel for a night. That’s a crazy grand prize, and if I knew about it earlier I would have actually tried harder in the contest.

The winning person only had less than 800 fans. If you had 9 friends advertise on Facebook to try and help you win this contest, and they all got 100 fans for you, you can reward all of them with a trip! I suspect that Virgin America didn’t expect to spend $30,000 on a promotion and only have 17 people enter though.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: hacks, toronto