US Airways Dividend Miles (Pre-FlightFund Merger) - US Airways Sales Prevention Site

So I'm getting ready to book a trip...

I go to the web site and decide to try a new approach -- instead of searchin for flights by "schedule" I click the "price" button and then click search flights when the date boxes disappear -- oops! You've got to be patient and wait for them to come back. No fair looking for flights without dates...

Ok, fine, so I put my dates in. Presto! 16 fares to choose from (plus "use miles") with the lowest fare handily selected for me. But, gee, since that's a 21 day advance it's not applicable to my desired dates -- and I can't get the calendar to go back to my dates until I guess which of the 16 fares are available on my dates. Luckily I just happen to know that if I let the cursor hover over the "i" icon and watch the status area of my browser and carefully decode the url I can probably figure out the advance purchase requirement. (Imagine explaining that to your grandmother...) Then I can calculate which fares are really potentially available for my dates.

Of course that's leaving out the additional 3 fares on page 2 of the fare list!

Fares range from $180 to $778 on page one. Page two has 3 more fares from $778 to $1,226. 3 fares are offered at $228, 2 @ $268, 2 @ $378, 2 @ $778. These are all supposedly "coach fares with restrictions". Oddly several of them turn up on the "coach fares without restrictions" options where I also find fares of $1,326 & $1,426. There's no way to directly purchase an F ticket when choosing by "price" though -- to do that you have to go to the secret "more options" button on the home page (BTW -- F goes for $1,563 on this route...)

And just to keep things fun -- if you pick a fare and then check availability for your dates it will lose your dates if you go back and forth between pages 1 & 2 of the fare list

Naturally there's NOTHING on the page that would give an innocent customer any kind of a clue what benefits there might be to selecting one fare over another. Not a single word. I suppose that helps with the self-fulfilling prophecy that only the price matters http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/rolleyes.gif

Nor is there anything to help a customer to know just exactly how restrictive a particular fare is (simple idea for the programmer -- just print the word count for the "i" page. That's all anyone really needs to know.)

It's a good thing that I've got plenty of time...

Very perceptive.. you've realized the USAir web site sucks. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif

I have felt your pain.
--Alex

Tom,
I have figured out the theme music US should add to the website. Alice Cooper's "Welcome To My Nightmare" will serve nicely I think don't you?

Perhaps this should be agenda item number one on the Cockroach Presentation I have been working on.

Yes, there is indeed a learning curve for practically every airline site. But USAir's sight is not quite so daunting once you've fiddled with it for a while. But I do share the frustration of having to undertake multiple tries to find what you're looking for.

I too was initially taken back by the "search by schedule" approach until I realize that one can also cull out flights by price using this approach.

The key is to look towards the left of your screen at the list of prices. The search always begins at the lowest fare for that specific itinerary and an active calender appears on the screen if there are booking fares availible at that price. Sometimes there are none availble. So you click the button for the next fare up and repeat this process until you find dates/fares which fit your plans.

The interactive calender shows which dates a specific fare is or is not availble. Sometimes you discover that by changing an arrival or departure date by one day, you can catch a much lower fare.

We're poking around for the heck of it and we use this approach to discover a $308 RT fare from PHL-SNN in May. So suddenly we're on our way to Ireland at a good price and with a double miles promo to boot. (It also pays to poke around the site carefully to root out those transient promo deals which are there for brief periods of time).

I experience some frustration on the US Air site recently when I want to check the rules of their dividend miles program. They are on the site all right, but in a hierarchial multi click HTML form only. I was looking for a downloadable PDF version that I can store on my computer and print/read at my leisure ( several of the other airline FF program rules are availible in downloadable PDF format).

I e-mail US Air with this concern/observation and I receive a response to my query. They see my point and will take a look at the idea. Don't know if this means that change is on the way, but there was real human contact.

Good luck with your searches and travel.

Barry

[This message has been edited by jerseyfinn (edited 04-13-2003).]

They should get a refund from whom ever created usair.com perhaps they can get some pointers from UA now. The worst part to me is that the confirmation number you recieve on line is NOT usable to a reservations agent. So now you end up with two confirmation numbers....The list of problems goes on.

Codeshare revenue higher than expected

http://biz.yahoo.com/rb/030414/airlines_usairways_codeshare_1.html

BWI -

Had missed that - thanks for staying on top of things. This is almost shocking!

Imagine how much more code-share revenue there would be if:

1) US had a website that reliably booked tickets
2) International UA flights included (ok, not to Asia ;-)

i learned yesterday it's a refund prevention site, too. unlike other airline sites, requesting a refund on a fully refundable ticket does not immediately cancel your reservation! i found this out when i ended up with two tickets on the same flight, and the agent checked me in on the wrong one--it was the return leg of a trip with an unused outbound. (i would have thought even if the web site didn't cancel the reservation, being a no-show for the outbound leg would have!)