I have had to use websites of many different airline companies. All their websites are universally bad. They always ask for the same five things: Departure date, return date, round trip or one-way ticket, origin, and destination airports. Despite this seemingly simple input list, their websites are often extremely clunky. There are a lot of moving elements, sliding presentation type top bars, a LOT of JavaScript. 99% of people who travel Economy probably book the cheapest ticket for their dates, origin, and destination. I don’t care much about the airline’s loyalty program1 or what their new “first class” cabin looks like (I am not going to book it anyway.)
There is also some issue with registration, login, and payments every time.
- With a billion different authentication libraries in the world, is it really that difficult to implement a simple registration and login scheme?
- Is it that hard to build a website with 5 fields of input and an output listing flight timings and cost?
- With so many payment providers, how hard can it be for these companies to pay for a good payment gateway?
I have had to deal with uncaptured credit card payments multiple times. i.e. the payment was authorized by my credit card’s company, but it was not “captured” by the receiver, thus causing the ticket to remain in “awaiting payment” limbo, until the travel day. When I show up at the check-in counter, airline staff tell me “there is a problem with your ticket” when the problem was really with their backend’s inability to process background jobs accurately.
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Loyalty programs have no benefit for people paying for their own tickets. If you are not traveling on more than 20 long-haul flights a year, forget loyalty programs and just book the cheapest ticket. ↩︎