Flight company’s booking system, not only riddled with software glitches, but they are so un-customer friendly that in order for ME to do THEM a favour and let them know why their web sales are so poor – alerting them to the software glitch, I either have to pay £s per minute to call their website helpdesk or post a blog about their immense screw-up (thereby shame-facing them at the same time) There is simply no other option available on their website for getting in touch with their webmasters – Come on guys a simple email address wouldn’t hurt, would it?
Sorry, deep breath, this has just got me so riled!
So, knowing that I was planning a short break in Spain later in the year, a friend kindly forwarded me a promotional mail he had received from Aer Lingus, about a sale on flights to Malaga.
Well, I’m in Marketing, so I was never going to be fooled that it would actually only cost £29.99 (not when you take into count that I wanted to fly at the weekend, I actually wanted a seat and to take a bag etc), but anyway, £102.56 each for me and my husband (plus a handling fee of £20) didn’t seem too awful.
Happy with the flight times – check.
Think an extra £370 pp to be able to take checked bags, have seat selection and airport lounge is a bit extreme, but happy to run with the cheap option – check.
Flights cheaper than taxes – typical – £20 handling fee snuck in there – typical – check.
Well, ready to complete the booking then…
Click continue.
Start filling in my details, scroll down – OMG!!! How come the price has suddenly hiked itself right up to almost £600!!!!!
Ouch, that’s a nasty software glitch. Working at a company that actually manufactures software testing solutions, I can tell you straight off, that this here is an application error – and not just a malicious ploy by the budget airline to part you from more of your hard-earned cash! It seems that Aer Lingus have not been testing their application very well. We’ve seen time and time again that choosing not to invest sufficiently in quality assurance can really come back to bite you on the rear end! With ample time devoted to testing, better test coverage, some validation rules and database effects, this would have been picked up way before it went public. Oh well.
Maybe some customers might not have double-checked the price again, and unknowingly proceeded, only to be ripped off by the good chaps at Aer Lingus, but more likely, customers like me, would have just been put off and decided to check out prices at BA instead! I guess I’ll do a good dead and let them know – perhaps suggest they buy our software while they are at it… An hour later and after crawling their website, I discover, to my annoyance, that unless I want to waste even more of my time and money phoning a premium rate number, there really is no way to contact their technical team! GRRRRRR! Oh well, at least it is good fodder for our ‘Software Testing Hall of Shame’!
In trying to re-create the error before I put this post live, I came across another, completely different bug , where the system now wouldn’t process to that last screen, but looped me back to the start again. Do they do ANY testing on their systems? It’s just riddled with bugs.
This is pretty awful but not at all surprising. A lot (perhaps most) of the websites in the hotel / travel / transport / leisure sectors are very badly broken and have been for a decade or more. The scary thing is that these are big-ticket items so the ROI in good testing is very high. How come these companies don’t see it?
We used to have a Rogues Gallery of terrible travel websites, similar to your Hall of Shame, but one of the large operators threatened to sue us out of existence so we took it down. Sadly nothing has changed in the five years since then.
When we spoke to a lot of companies in these sectors a few years ago they all said they developed the sites in-house because they change almost daily. As such it was not financially viable to use external development agencies. What shocked me was the number of in-house ‘teams’ that had absolutely no significant experience – we joke about the MD’s teenage sons doing the development but very often that really was the case. The evidence suggests it still is.
Comment by Steve Green — August 6, 2010 @ 1:28 am
I once had a problem with Gateway Computers. I called their helpline, hung on for an hour listening to their choice of ‘trying to connect you’ music and hung up for ever after hearing the song “You ain’t nothin but a Hound Dog” for the second time.
I guess someone in Aer Lingus will see this in due course. The response will be interesting.
Comment by James — August 6, 2010 @ 8:27 am
Potentially useful site for such “non-contact” situations – has lots of CEO’s email addresses. http://www.connectotel.com/marcus/ceoemail.html
Unfortunately it doesn’t have Aer Lingus
You could try ccu@aerlingus.com (Customer Care Unit)? It would be interesting to see how (if?) they responded
Comment by Margaret — August 6, 2010 @ 10:51 am
Aer Lingus have a very poor standard of customer service.
They owe me 500 Euros from April to do with Volcanic Disruption and six months later nothing.
They will not even contact me.
I doubt I would use Aer Lingus again
Comment by Gerry Motherwell — October 29, 2010 @ 5:37 pm