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Aeroplan stupidity

Posted July 16th, 2007 by mattm
in

Last night I decided that I needed to book a one way trip from Ottawa to Toronto for Tuesday afternoon of this week. I certainly didn't want to pay for it, so I navigated over to Aeroplan.com, logged in and did a search.

Wow! About 5 flight choices. Some for 11,400 points, and better ("Classic Plus") for 14,500 points. The 2PM departure I wanted was 14,500 which...I guess is OK. So I chose the 2PM, entered all my details. End result: "A problem on our end... EC=NOPNR". I tried again, same deal.

Before I continue, I want to interject here about error handling. All too often, product managers will put this at the bottom of their list when pressed. I would rather use a booking engine that was a bit lighter in features...but almost always works, and when it does not...it tells you exactly why.

I was feeling persistent last night, so I called their tech support. They had a real winner on last night who asked me the typical questions, according to him (?):

  • Did you spell your name correctly?Yes.
  • Did you input a country code? If you did, and the number is North American (1), then sometimes that breaks the server.Yes. I did. Oops.
Another interjection if I may... if you ask someone for a phone number, and present them with 3 text boxes (1 for country code, one for area code and one for local exchange number (e.g. 1 613 7762222)...your implementation should expect people to enter all three boxes, or put a note somewhere saying that the 1st is not required if you are in North America. This is the most asinine error I have seen in some time, and I have seen some really asinine software in my time.

So I tried it all again without a country code, and it worked...sorta. Well, actually...It gave me a new error saying the flight wasn't available due to their super-duper-real-time booking engine. That's not true, tech support says....so he connects me to a "Classic award specialist".

Ah, now we'll get somewhere...I have a booking specialist. Not so. The flight I need is a "classic plus" reward, and a lowly "classic" specialist can't help me there. Now I'm put on hold for one of these special agents.

Note to Aeroplan: this is stupid. Just train them all for all sorts of rewards.

I finally get a special agent (elapsed time: 1hr from opening firefox and going to Aeroplan.com). She pulls up the flight, but for some reason can't find "pricing" information...i.e. how many points to charge me. She goes off, gets someone who can. Price = 25,400 points. Sheesh...OK...I have an hour invested in this, so I'll go for it.

"There is a $30 dollar charge for booking on the telephone on top of your $20.25 in "taxes"", says my special agent. An argument ensues. I can't actually book it online..heck...SHE couldn't book it from her desk. Her argument is that the chain of agents that I spoke to did not pass a special exception code to her. I tell her to go find someone with an exception code. She does. I pay $20.

1:20 later, I have a booking reference.

*sigh* I really wish there was another big carrier in Canada with business class seating and coast to coast reach. It might keep AC/AP on their toes.

Heros are Air Canada

Submitted by Duane Nickull (not verified) on Mon, 07/16/2007 - 16:29.

No - its' your fault. You obviously forgot your secret decoder ring and didn't guess the sole correct combination of over twelve thousand potential formatting conventions for all the form fields. LOL!

You - "Your application doesn't work"
Them = "What did you enter it to cause it to break?"

Anyone up for handling exceptions and user input validation hints?

What sucks is that I passed

Submitted by mattm on Mon, 07/16/2007 - 16:36.

What sucks is that I passed their validation tests. You would think Air Canada/Aeroplan could hire some interaction designers and focus on some basic usability...given their volume.