Frustrating airline websites

[leadman]

I've recently had to book some "off-grid" flights and run into some very frustrating airline websites. When you are on the road it can so hard to book or re-book the next flight. Some of my latest were;

Tarom was a wonderful site for quick lessons in Romanian! As you progressed through the booking it kept defaulting back to Romanian from English. After 30 minutes you learn enough of the language to book. The Bulgarian Air was almost as good, but as you searched/selected the flights kept dissappearing, even for my travel agent! Biman out of Bangladesh, after transgressing all the data pages, including credit card details, you find out you still have to pay and pick up the tickets at their offices!

Try searching the Vietnam Skyteam site in regards to their FF programme, I'm sure Microsoft developed their "circular arguments" from here, a permanent loop! And if you cannot remember your password, dont expect it to be e:mailed to you for at least a week, if ever!

To top it off, going through my accounts i found MH had charged me a flight, but when i was attempting to book it their website said it could not be processed and dumped me out of the system after CC payment. I booked on TG as it was a codeshare. Now i have to "try" to claim it back, as their Help team is calling it a no show!

So amongst the good ones, there are a lot of frustrating ones......

 

[juddles]

For frustration go no further than LAN. Sure there are worse sites, with no english, as per your post. But with LAN you actually expect half a chance.

WRONG.

 

[TomVexille]

Asiana is pretty average, even after they gave it a major overhaul.

 

[Warks]

So you've used the Virgin Australia website then? World's worst 'upgrade'. Still not fixed nearly two years later.

 

[Justinf]

+1 for Virgin Australia. I just love having to log in twice to Velocity to perform the most simple of tasks.

 

[Melburnian1]

The SQ website was extremely ordinary immediately afrter its upgrade a small number of years ago, but now works fine.

I do not like the Royal Brunei website as it is one of a number of airlines that does not have its flight timetable for a six monthly period available in one place: you have to search by individual route and date.

I appreciate that for a six month period, many airlines are going to have lots of schedule changes - school holidays versus non school holidays domestically in Oz may be one reason.

However rail operators - NSWTrainLink and V/Line are two - manage to show all their train times in easy to comprehend individual tables by route. Why can't more airline websites do this?

Top marks for trying would have to go to JL, a truly underrated airline. It makes an honest attempt to show the timetable, while MH retains the excellent old style 'booklet' type layout showing flights alphabetically such as MEL to Accra, Bangkok, Chicago and so (hypothetical city examples, not necessarily true for MH - just examples of 'A, 'B', 'C'...

PR is also good as is 5J. Both display complete timetables in one spot. Both contrast with Asiana: a very poor website.

The VA website unfortunately leaves much to be desired. It is worse for timetable lookup than QF.

The REX website is too 'busy'. One loses interest quickly as it's too challenging for the eye.

 

[Shan Man]

Top marks for trying would have to go to JL, a truly underrated airline. It makes an honest attempt to show the timetable.

The one thing that bugs me about the JL website is that I cannot book an Open Jaw ticket that doesn't start in Japan from any of their global sites, not even the Japan one!

I.E.
Seoul-Tokyo-Hong Kong,
Syd-Tokyo-Seoul,
Taipei-Tokyo-Sydney

If there is away to do it online, can someone please let me know!

 

[Bolthead]

Besides the issue of not being able to book multi-city bookings I like the VA website...

 

[smeacs]

Is there some fundemental explanation that has stopped somone developing a website that allows more complexity for booking flights ? ( i may have nissed it)

My gripe was
JL ( great airline ) but they didnt allow me to book 6 months ahead at the time, it may have been user error.
and QF's multi citybookign not letting you have 3 flights depart on the same day ADL-SYD/MEL- ZQN which you can book on their normal booking engine.

 

[dragonman]

South African airlines get my nomination - for me the site times out before you can enter payment details and I ain't slow. On an iPad or phone you can totally forget it.

 

[boomy]

I don't like Asiana's website. Difficult to manage your booking if it was done via OZ and impossible if it was done via other *A members.