I have been trying all day to get price quotes for a couple of flights within the next twelve months. I have not managed. Here is why, sorted by company, and for all companies that make sense for the routes:
Swiss
When you click on the calendar fields to choose the departure date, a window pops up:
Shortly you see if there are flights available on your preferred date.
“Shortly” has lasted for as long as 3 hours, which is when I decided to try again, and ultimately to try someone else.
Emirates
On submission of their form, I am being told:
Sorry, we were temporarily unable to process your request due to a technical problem. Please wait a moment and try again.
I’ve waited countless moments, and now, 11 hours since my first try, their idea of a moment still isn’t over. But what kind of technical problem is this anyway, which resolves itself on retry after waiting a moment?
Austrian Airlines
Our website is currently undergoing maintenance. Please come back later.
All day.
Air New Zealand
Once I hit “search flights”, I get a blank page: a proper HTTP response followed by 0 bytes of HTML.
British Airways
Whenever I hit submit, I am told that the return date has to be after the outbound date. I am then taken back to the form, which preserved all fields, except for resetting both dates to the same day, a week from now.
Malaysia Airlines
An error has occurred processing your request. Please contact our technical staff.
… without a link or any hint as to how to contact them.
I just tried them all again, without any changes; 11 hours later. Apparently they don’t want my business.
I really wonder what the future of air travel will be. In many ways, I hope they stop dumping prices and concentrate again on customer satisfaction. But I guess that applies to pretty much everything these days.
PS: I especially appreciate Easyjet’s policy of separating friends: after buying one ticket on a given route in August and finding out that we need a second one, I am told that “the route you have selected will be available from 28 October 2007”. The funny thing is that we already have a ticket for that route in August. They just don’t want my friend to fly along…
NP: Gazpacho: Firebird
Update: Sam Morris alerted me to Kayak, a very impressive meta-search engine for flights. Sure beats visiting each site in turn (although that could get you better deals through specials), and also replaces STA Travel and Opodo for me.
Update: Enrico Zini points me to skyscanner, which complements Kayak in that it searches only the low-cost airlines. Kayak does include EasyJet, but they aren’t always the cheapest.
