Wannabe interisland travelers who tried to snap up go!'s $1 tickets overwhelmed the airline's Web site within minutes yesterday, prompting go! to extend the offer and double the number of $1 seats.

"I've had better days," said Jonathan Ornstein, the head of go!'s parent company, Mesa Air Group Inc. "We're upset the sale did not come off as we had hoped. Everybody was pumped but we ended up disappointed."

go! planned to offer 1,000 one-way, interisland seats for $1 yesterday to celebrate its first year of Hawai'i operations. The seats were to be available only through go!'s Web site from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. for travel through Dec. 15 and did not include fees and taxes.

go! normally gets about 10,000 hits per day on its Web site, Ornstein said. But within the first minutes of the $1 fare offering, the site received 19,000 hits, which crashed the system, Ornstein said.

From 7:03 a.m. to about 2:45 p.m., go!'s Web site was down and Ornstein doubts that any of the original 19,000 visitors got through to book a $1 seat. So go! extended its offer through midnight and doubled the number of $1 seats to 2,000.

"I'm not sure if anybody completed a transaction," Ornstein said. "It wasn't like anybody was getting the seats and you weren't."

Ornstein and a message on go!'s Web site blamed the problem on SABRE, the company's Internet booking provider, which had been able to handle go!'s $9 interisland tickets last month, Ornstein said.

"Our Web center and our sales department were prepared," Ornstein said. "But SABER systems was not prepared. We were shocked that ticket sales for five 50-seat airplanes would crash the system."

SABER officials could not be reached for comment yesterday.

Ornstein insisted that go! is in Hawai'i's interisland market "for the long haul" and benefits from its cut-rate fare offerings, which have gone from $39 to $19 to $9 to $1.

Unlike other go! discounts, neither Hawaiian nor Aloha airlines said they would match the $1 fares.

"We sell a lot of other seats when we do these promotions," Ornstein said. "And we get a lot more people who sign up for e-mail alerts and frequent-flier miles and buy tours and rent cars. It's part of building your brand."

During last month's $9 discounted fares, Ornstein said, the number of go!'s frequent fliers increased 25 percent over three days, adding 6,500 new members.

"When we give away 1,000 seats at $1, the cost of that is $40,000 or $50,000 of a regular fare," Ornstein said. "But we get far more promotional value. And a lot of people will buy a $1 ticket one way, then buy a $59 ticket the other way."

Ornstein acknowledged that getting a $1 seat was "a little bit like an Easter egg hunt."

He also bristled at some of the comments by go! interisland competitors.

"Our competitors have very accurately pointed out that we're two-thirds full," Ornstein said. "But that just leaves us seats for promotional purposes. So why not do that?"

Aloha spokesman Stu Glauberman called go!'s latest discount fares "an act of desperation. After a year of trying to break into the market, we're confident that the people of Hawai'i will see this for what it is and stay loyal to their homegrown carriers."

Reach Dan Nakaso at dnakaso@honoluluadvertiser.com.