Airline websites still suck
Updated on Dec 27, 2007: I wrote this post in frustration—a year ago—while trying in vain to access airline websites in India. It is heartening to note that both Kingfisher and Jet Airways have vastly improved their sites to make them friendlier and usable to most people, including those on dialup.
With the advent of e-ticketing, one would assume that it’s fun to secure tickets online. For the most part it is. You just print your confirmation which, by itself, is your ticket. Produce this at the airline counter at the Departure terminal and you’ll be issued a boarding pass.
So what am I cribbing about? Well, a couple of tiny things. And this essentially applies to two of India’s premier airline services: Kingfisher and Jet Airways. If these are such a pain, think of the rest of the pack. I don’t want to go there in one hour of my paid online time at a cyber cafe:
One — The websites take ages to load on dial-up. If you leave out metros and mega cities, India is still, essentially, a dial-up country. Unless the airlines want to cater only to the urban mass, they’ve got to scrape the crap out of their websites and load only the most essential and most usable, if they want people to make use of their e-ticketing feature easily and conveniently. I really hope that was the prime reason for introducing it in the first place. Or else, people may not be able to complete the sale of ticket process online without getting knocked off midway through transaction because of a poor web design. That would be a complete shame for such a good idea like e-ticketing.
If e-ticketing can load-up fast enough, most people, both young and old, can book and print their tickets from the comfort of their homes, without having to pay that agent some commission, not to mention the limited choice he has with certain airlines, as a vendor.
For most of my trips, I flew Kingfisher only because I could access their site to book online. Jet Airways website refused to load most of the time. Plus, its interface is highly confusing, boggles the unfamiliar mind.
Guys at Jet Airways, what are you doing? You just lost over 20k of my pure cash in sale because your website didn’t load. If you care about making that sale, get off your fat asses and do something about it.
Two — E-ticketing is synonymous with printing. Because you’ll need to produce this at the counter (you could as well just remember the PNR number, but a print is convenient and doubles up as the proof of ticket purchased). And yet, none, I repeat, none have a customized print.
Just add a print stylesheet to remove the unwanted header graphics you dumbheads, so that I don’t have to print Mallya’s stupid face.
I had a funny incident at Connaught Place, New Delhi while reserving my ticket online and wanted a print. The guy said grayshade print would cost me Rs 10, and the color, Rs 25. It’s obvious that I didn’t need a color print, even if Rs 25 seems a small amount to really worry about. So we simply took the color cartridge out, for lack of options.
What I am saying is why give this an option? Why print the unwanted: backgrounds (as foreground graphics) and very colorful sidebars thereby wasting my money for the airlines’ flamboyant penchant for colors. (Try the print preview in your browser on those sites, and you’ll know what I am saying.)
Airline logo, passenger’s name in prominence, ticket PNR number, online check-in telephone numbers and helpline numbers and a couple of other useful telephone numbers (like airline helpdesk, enquiry, local police, etc, displayed on the ticket along with destination, date and time of departure, etc. should be the essential part in what would be termed a simple, yet an elegant, printout, without the unwanted splurge of color.
Instead, what we have here is an e-ticket that has company’s unwanted photos and logos along with website’s sidebar occupying two-thirds of the ticket’s print area. Plus, you’ll need to print it in landscape or else, you’ll lose some useful information to the right margin.
What a bunch of idiots for two of the biggest airline companies. They don’t seem to know the first thing about issuing an e-ticket, in print.