One year ago, Jordan wrote an excellent piece on the flawless online ticketing process carried out for the Michael Jackson Memorial. Well, I suppose for every yin there must be a yang — and I can tell you firsthand that the online ticketing process for the 2010 FIFA World Cup is certainly nothing to brag about.

You see, ordering tickets should be a straightforward process. You place your order, you receive confirmation of that order, and then you receive delivery confirmations or redemption instructions. But in the case of certain events such as the Jackson Memorial and the World Cup, there is one small difference in that ticketing lotteries are used to determine who receives tickets.

In theory, email is the perfect medium to execute a ticketing lottery. Once the drawing is complete, winning contestants can be reached instantly and privately with news of their purchase. Compared to past World Cups which have relied on postal mail and phone systems, email has provided a much more cost-effective and immediate medium for communicating with customers.

Unfortunately, FIFA really dropped the ball on their first attempt at online ticketing using email.

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Let’s say you have an upcoming vacation or trip and want to plan accordingly. So you subscribe to a million different email lists related to travel, including airlines, cruise ships, travel destinations etc. Then your trip is canceled or delayed. Boo!

Typically you have three email options

1. Ignore the travel emails in your inbox and become inactive.
2. Go through the tedious unsububscribe process or simply hit spam on all the emails that you signed up for and no longer want.
3. Periodically open the emails and dream about the vacation that might not happen.

Recently I saw an unsubscribe page from a company called Vacations To Go that offers a nice fourth option for the discerning email traveler. They offer an option to suspend your current subscription and then choose a month when the subscription will restart. Vacations To Go also offers a frequency option of once a week, once a month, and every two months. This is smart – especially in the fickle and highly competitive travel industry.

Here is the opt out/out down page from Vacations To Go:

What other creative opt-downs have you seen?