Hidemi's Rambling No.368

For the first time in six months since I moved in a new town surrounded by the mountains, I’m going to get out of the town by going down the mountains to the city. I’m going on a trip to Tokyo Disney Resort and my hometown next month. After precise planning, I made a reservation for a hotel and trains online yesterday. I found myself lucky when I saw some online special discount packages just released on the same day. The package included a hotel stay and a round-trip train ticket, which was cheaper than the list price of the train ticket. That meant a high-class hotel stay would be completely free. I jumped to the offer, filled out the application form and clicked a submit button. The web site showed an error message saying it was already sold out. When I got back to the package list page, the one I had chosen turned into an unavailable sign. It seemed sold out while I was filling out the form. I chose the second-cheapest package among the available ones, filled out the form and submitted. The result was again that it had been sold out. I repeated this for five or six times and still couldn’t make it. Each time, by the time I clicked a submit button, the item had been snatched. Was everyone online all at once making a reservation at this particular web site, for the same destination and date? Could it be possible? Or, was the application system simply gone down? While suspicion took hold of me, my online reservation had become a fierce battle of speed. Finally, I successfully made it with a less discounted package. Although it was still a great discount, I felt like I made a loss after seeing the bigger discount items…