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Great Airline Booking Site: Hawaiian Airlines


:P
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I just booked my flight back to the mainland for the summer and ended up on the Hawaiian Airlines Web site. With all the crappy airline sites out there I usually avoid booking anything with the airlines directly opting for the more functional travel sites like Expedia et al. But the Hawaiian site was actually a joy to use. For one thing it is an ASP.NET site and it looks like they are utilizing some minor AJAX functionality for things like seat selection and few other things. The site is nicely formatted and logically laid out, but the feature I really like when I book flights is the ability to see prices for adjacent dates easily. If you go in pick a set of dates on most sites you have to reenter the whole query information to get the nearby rates which is a pain. Here these prices show up right on a tab you can click on and the change is immediate.

 

However, I'll never understand that so many sites can have real slick designs and otherwise well designed layout and flow in site design and then have one simple issue: Flunk Credit Card entry. This site is well done, but if you put in Credit Card information with spaces or dashes, you run out of space in the input box. Ok, here's a question: How hard is it to strip out spaces and separators in .NET? I always marvel at this silly behavior of so many sites. Here at least you see your mistake immediately because if you enter a space or other separator the field length will be too short so you can't submit the whole number – so it's semi obvious. Much worse are sites that let you enter the value with separators and then let you know on the POST back that you failed to type an unreadably long string <g>…

 

Another site that I remember also being slick although not as nice looking was Southwest. So how is it that the smaller airlines understand the value of a usable WebSite compared to United, American and Northwest all three of which are laughable sites?

 


The Voices of Reason


 

Gabe
February 15, 2006

# re: Great Airline Booking Site: Hawaiian Airlines

The larger the company, the more red tape and politics. I've seen companies that take 3 months of paper work to approve a memory upgrade for a machine that is offline!

rich
February 15, 2006

# re: Great Airline Booking Site: Hawaiian Airlines

"So how is it that the smaller airlines understand the value of a usable WebSite compared to United, American and Northwest all three of which are laughable sites"

Simple - just look at what a cluster-f*** those three airlines are. The same boneheaded management responsible for their "flight operations" is also behind their abortions of web sites, the development of which is doubtless outsourced to the cheapest location.


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