DAVID RICE

I’m pretty sure it’s not just me and that the easyjet website really is quite badly put together, I mean the design lameness would take at least a couple of hours to write out. Tonight however, while trying to simply book one flight from Berlin back to Belfast (RailsConfEurope here I come!) I got a whole host of software development nasties presented to me. I managed to get all the way to the final step but clicking the submit button it hung for ages. Deciding to let it run the course I finally got this lovely error;

After this I got a couple Service Unavailables and then I finally got a booking confirmation, not exactly confidence inspiring since it was the last page, god knows if I’ll be receiving a rake of withdrawals from my bank. No wonder I worry about my bags.

Lets be fair now, what travel company’s website doesn’t suck, be honest. Even the ones doing something remotely cool, well their site still does kinda suck. One of the main problems in my mind is that when you’re booking flights you don’t really care where you depart from, it’s where you end up that’s important. I couldn’t care less if I flew from Belfast or Dublin, but when searching even with Sky Scanner (which does a good job of comparing flights) you still need to search for the two different departures.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we lived in a world where this wasn’t the standard of airline sites? Where airline operators offered free data APIs so cross comparison sites could start to be more useful? When I could just arrive at a site and answer the question Where do you want to go today? Or… maybe I’m just a dreamer.

UPDATE: Woo a really cool flights search just popped up on my radar thanks to my transcontinental buddy. Sky scanner, you are now relegated.