False Advertisement - Sea World doesn't care (edited)

Edited to add -- this post is now moot, blogging about the problem managed to un-jinx the site! That means we'll be going. I still have mixed feelings about parks, but I know they're fun. And of course it helps if it ' doesn't hurt" one's pocket so much. ;-)


I want to come back and post some photos of our afternoon walk at the beach, but first (while I watch The Empire Strikes Back with hubby and friend -- I'm enjoying it too!) I want to express my disgust at the false advertisement in the the SeaWorld Cares campaign.

I'm not a big fan of theme parks although I really like roller-coasters and I've been to lots of parks and intend to visit more with my sons in the future (in spite of my reservations). Apart from several issues with theme parks -- I don't like Disney and I'm concerned with wild animals being kept in captivity for the enjoyment of the masses -- my main problem with parks is how much they cost and, being a thrifty person, I can't fully enjoy the parks if I'm not getting the most for what I paid. So... I generally prefer season passes or weekly passes that allow several visits. In the times when we've bought day passes in the past we've stayed for as long we possibly could and tried to see everything.

Back to our current short trip to Florida. When we visited back in 2006 for over two weeks we went to two parks only: Wet'n Wild (a water park) and Sea World and visited both relatively leisurely, since the boys were two and four and we had plenty of time. This trip is much quicker and we wanted to spend only one day somewhere special, so we were debating whether to go to the Kennedy Space Center (K's choice) or Sea World (Kelvin's choice and mine).

It turns out that Sea World has had a special promotion since April 2010, "Seaworld Cares" in which a paing adult who buys a single day admission can pay only 5 dollars for a child's admission. And the five dollars are donated to nature conservation. The problem is that when one tries to buy the promotional tickets, there is an error message in the shopping cart:

We're sorry. There is a system error preventing us from completing your request. Please try again or come back later.

Nice, huh?

I tried in different browsers. I even tried using other promotional codes, but nothing. Of course because we need to go tomorrow, it's no use complaining, trying to contact them, etc. And because the promotion seems to be online only, I don't think we can simply go there tomorrow and try to have it honored at the park.

Why can't they have an announcement in the website making it clear that the promotion is sold out, no longer available or something? Why make us feel utterly duped? I tried to google to find out whether other people have encountered the same problem, but I haven't been successful so far. Even MORE frustrating.
:(

Anyway... There are two little boys who will be very disappointed when they wake up tomorrow morning. And K and I still haven't decided where we're going...

The good thing is I've taught the boys well and I'm positive they'll understand that if we can't use the five dollars promotion, we shouldn't go anyway. ;)