Comment by alister | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alister | Hacker News Reader

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Having tried the new virginamerica.com site just now, I don't really see a big difference between their site and anyone else's. Having booked through a lot of different airline sites over the last 15 years, I want to say that the differences between airline sites were much greater in the early web years.

All the airline sites seemed to have converged to a common model. They all follow exactly the same flow: pick cities and dates, then pricing, then sign in, etc. There was far greater variation in the flow in the early years.

> but from a usability perspective it might just be the worst

Oh, I can cite major airline websites that are much worse from a usability perspective. Trying to book a flight on any Brazilian airline is impossible unless you're Brazilian. That's because every airline in Brazil has inexplicably decided that they want you to enter your Brazilian identity number -- explained in more detail here:

http://brazilsense.com/index.php?title=Booking_a_domestic_fl...

If you're not Brazilian, you don't have such a number of course. Note that this is not any sort of legal requirement; it's just thoughtlessness about usability by the airlines.

I expect a lot of indignation this summer when visitors try to arrange flights inside of Brazil during the World Cup.

As someone currently helping to build an airline website, I'll just point out that the booking process, and other processes concerning the interaction with actual flight data, are controlled by a few organizations (global distribution systems) that have access to this data and our hampered with bureaucratic workflows. The airline itself might be able to hire great designers and developers to build out the informational side of their site, but the actual booking process has to contend with a slew of regulations (and IMO are poorly run and horribly old school) to connect customers to booking and seat picking services. It is very hard to innovate in this area.

Sure, external constraints aren't always apparent to the public. But in this particular case, the Brazilian airlines can't claim that because visitors to Brazil can buy airline tickets through other interfaces (from travel agents or at airline ticket counters [1]). So their back-end systems are perfectly capable of selling tickets without demanding a Brazilian identity number (the CPF number). This problem exists only with their web interface.

[1] http://brazilsense.com/index.php?title=Booking_a_domestic_fl...

Even with a CPF, the document needed (which isn't excessively hard to get if you're a foreigner in Brazil), there's another problem...using a US card to pay. Unless they've changed their ways in the last few years it's still near impossible to pay on any Brazilian airline site or any Kayak-like site in Brazil with an American debit card with Visa or Mastercard symbol.

Last time I had to book at SDU (Rio airport), I needed to take most of my day to go to the airport, wait in long lines and buy the ticket physically, with cash or (get this) by card! This was a 5-6h process including public transport (and I actually lived 10m away by car at the time).

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At the risk of getting too off-topic (which I may have already done above), here's another recent public transport problem, when bus drivers went on strike in Sao Paulo, this is what happened on the metro. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXycKeyDKXk

I ran into this a few years ago and had to buy tickets at a travel agent. What I never understood was, why all of these sites have English versions available in the first place? They obviously went through the effort to translate the site but then ultimately you can't buy tickets unless you're Brazilian in which case you don't need an English site.

"Trying to book a flight on any Brazilian airline is impossible unless you're Brazilian"

I'm a UK citizen and recently booked and flew on an internal Brazilian flight. I used my UK passport number in the slot for the Brazilian identity number, there were no problems at all.

There may have been updates to the airline sites due to the World Cup but the sentiment many people have expressed as to the difficulty of getting a flight as a foreigner is long-standing.

What airline did you use, btw?

How about booking with the identity number 0?

It has the same functionality as any other site, but many of the ways in which it's presented is far less easy to use (for instance, the calendar select is pretty looking but not nearly as obvious to use as even the standard ugly jQueryUI calendar widget).

The Brazilian airline policy of requiring an identity number is definitely a terrible decision on their part, but that doesn't excuse other airlines from making needlessly flashy and overcomplicated complicated UI's.

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