vrichard

I'm constantly disappointed by airline websites, but Asiana's has got to be one of the worst in the world.

1) If I put 'flyasiana.com' in my address bar, a totally blank page loads.
No error. No content. (Firefox 3.5.x)
If I go to www.flyasiana.com, I'm hit with a giant, humungous, irrelevant Flash movie that must load before I can SKIP. Not pretty. Not nice. Forget about dial-up speeds and using the website at all.

2) After I skip, I'm presented with a Korean site. I haven't learned Korean yet, but thankfully there is an ENGLISH link. Which I click. And I'm taken to a page with title 'For Foreigners residing in Korea' which does have ability to search for flights near top/center of page, and defaults to Domestic - which is what I want.

3) After I select my cities and dates, I'm presented with an unnecessary dialog that I must acknowledge - "For domestic internet ticket purchase,
the reservation and purchase must be made at the same time." For some city pairs, there are TWO of these dialogs (that interrupt ability to do anything in any tab of the browser)!!!

3a) While they've got flash and javascript and all sorts of unnecessary code, they haven't put in the simple code required to change the RETURN date's month to one that isn't impossible: the screen defaults to showing the current month for depart and return, and if you change depart to a later month, the return stays at an impossible before-you leave date.

3b) If you return to the flight search screen in any way (link, back button, etc) it doesn't remember your departure/arrival cities and changes them back to the initial defaults. Great.

4) THEN, there's a login screen. Only now do you find out that to even search for or price flights, you must be an Asiana Club member???!!!! Outrageous!!!

4a) The login has a radio-button box to enter either User ID or Member ID. Well Firefox can remember the UserID/Password, but fills it in for the default (UserID) when it is the member ID, and selecting the member ID radio button causes the filled-in remembered id/password to blank out. Great!

5) Then, the flight results with weird html - both IE and Firefox display near the top:
6) Then, the flights scheduled for the day appear whether or not they can be purchased. And it's not clear (if all flights are sold out) that you can't buy a ticket as the page has this nebulous statement:
7) Then if flights can be selected and you continue on, I get text that includes:
Infant science training course??????????????

8) Pay with a foreign issued credit card - they have this obscure info:
What the heck is a Visa/Mastercard Online Transaction System? (They probably are referring to 'Verified by Visa' or MasterCard's SecureCode - I guess)....

Truly unbelievably horrible website!!!

bobbybrown

I agree with you most of the parts. Korea is Internet-Explorer oriented nation, so most websites (especially government running websites) do not work with firefox or safari. If you begin with us.flyasiana.com as I do, instead of flyasiana.com, you'll directly get into Asiana USA website. If you're not using IE, you'll never get what you want. If you're in front of PC with IE, still the website requires to install weird programs called Active-X which you don't want at all. Just keep away from any Korean websites - that's the safest way to keep your PC from all the viruses. If you're using Mac, find PC.

Foreign card is extremely hard to use in Korea or any Korean company website. Because they usually require one stupid verification process which is impossible with foreign card. That online transaction system may work with IE, but not Firefox.

Then how to buy Korean domestic ticket? Orbitz has it, but with some fee - $5 or $10, I guess. Or, can you call Asiana and get some help? All other Korean travel agency websites are even worse than flyasiana.com, so you don't want them either. Sorry, but south Korea is like north Korea for firefox users - non-approachable.

lee_apromise

^ Can't agree more !!

toyotaboy95

+1^

Regarding the login to book mechanism, very very few airlines are using this "fraud-prevention" method anymore. Hard to imagine Asiana, a 5-star airline, using this.

DownUnderFlyer

VRichard, you must be the first person who has ever tried to actually use the OZ website.

Everything you say it true. With a PC and an IE the website is bad. With everything else, it is worse.

You can't even book a flight on their website at all for some of their departure points (HKG for example).

bobbybrown

Still worst website is better than worst in-flight service or something. You might think Asiana is not putting any money on its website, but they spend as much as others do. Asiana's Korean website is brilliant (of course under PC+IE) and unnecessarily fancy (as typical Korean websites). They just don't know what a global standard is. They are just happy as long as they reside "in" Korea.

OneWorldTraveller

As a Korean, I also totally agree to your opinion.. In US, It takes so long time to access to flyasiana.com, on the other hand, us.flyasiana.com features almost nothing.. Recently, asianaclub korean website is newly constructed, but it is also based on flash, so takes long time, and hard to open in firefox..

skywalkerLAX

Pairs well with the worst customer service in the world

A_Lee

I'll second that. It is truly frustrating sometimes for someone who prefers Firefox to try to use just about any Korean website. I can't say I've ever come across any major Korean website that appears to have been tested with Firefox. 99% of Koreans I don't think even know about Firefox. Korea is absolutely a 100% IE dominated world and if you're using anything else, you can forget it.

I am in agreement that Asiana is a 5 star airline, but as I've stated in the past, even a 5 star airline doesn't rate 5 stars in every single category. In OZ's case, their website is clearly their sore spot and probably doesn't even deserve a 1 star rating. It is designed by Koreans for Koreans and probably works well for them. For everyone else they've put minimal effort into accomodating them and all that work is obviously done by Koreans with somewhat limited English skills, and the resultant website is either not tested at all or only very basically tested.

If you can believe it, it's actually better now that it was several years ago. I remember perhaps 5 years ago or so, I wanted to book some international tickets ex-Korea via the internet. I went to Asiana's website and when I clicked on the 'English' link, it took me to the USA site, where I could only book tickets ex-USA. There was no website for 'foreigners who reside in Korea' at that time. The same with the KE website. The same was true with most Korean websites at that time. They all failed to provide even the most basic interface for doing business with foreign customers. At least now they've taken the first step, and hopefully public scrutiny of their abysmal website will improve things even more in the future.

A_Lee

I can't agree with that comment. From a western point-of-view, Korean customer service is quite different. The same can be said for many countries where they have a different culture and a different culture of customer service. Westerners are typically accustomed to having businesses bend over backwards to provide them with excellent customer service. The motto 'the customer is always right' is the standard. Korea and many Asian countries take a much more moderate approach to customer service and the customer isn't necessarily always right. When something goes wrong and it's the fault of the business, you can't expect much more than an apology. If you're a westerner with your first time to have a problem with Asiana or any Korea company you might be shocked at their response. If you were to lose your cool at their reaction though, any Koreans around you would probably think there was something wrong with you for your negative reaction.

As an example, I was recently in a slightly upscale Korean restaurant nearby Seoul, eating dinner with a group of Koreans. The service had to have been the absolute worst I've ever expereinced in any restaurant anywhere in the world. I made nearly a dozen requests for water and was ignored every time. We ordered some meat (to cook at the in-table barbeque) and were ignored. For two hours our requests were continously ignored. I'm almost always a very calm person, but I started to lose it. Finally I got up and walked back to the kitchen and demanded a pitcher of water and for the waitress to deliver our order. A few in the group of Koreans looked on in horror at my actions and one of them asked me to calm down. I don't think I was overreacting by any stretch of the imagination according to western standards, but to Koreans they would rather just sit in this situation and accept the abysmal customer service. I then talked to the manager and told him about how absolutely horrible their service was. The only thing I got was an apology. No discount off our bill or a free dish or drink or any real measure to back up their apology.

Not trying to compare my experience above and say that Asiana's customer service is anywhere near that bad. I'm just trying to point out that Koreans don't expect anything other than an apology when things go wrong.

While I certainly can see some drawing parallels between a bad website and bad customer service, and meeting foreign customers' expectations, I think they are different. I guess the reason is that having spent lots of time in both Asia and in western countries I've come to the conclusion that westerner customer service is overdone. From a customer point-of-view, looking strictly at getting good service, of course it's great. But it comes at a cost. Western companies probably spend an inordinate amount on providing this good customer service and have to raise prices as a result. I would rather get a more normal customer service and pay a more reasonable price. But that's just my personal view and certainly accept that others see it very differently. On the other hand, making a website that's up to western standards, doesn't involve much expense when looking at the big picture. If only they'd hire one non-native Korean who's totally up to speed on western website standards, they could do a bang-up job. Compared to their sales to foreigners the cost of hiring that one person would be miniscule. Providing western style customer service to each and every passenger though would be a huge cost and force them to raise their prices.

DownUnderFlyer

I also can't agree with this statement. Their onboard customer service is great. On the ground service or the Asiana Club service is a different matter but certainly not the worst in the world.

A_Lee

Just to be clear, I agree with that and when using the term 'customer service', I was referring to customer service on the ground. In the air, OZ has become my favorite airline. I haven't found any airline that has such a high percent of flight attendants who seem to be genuinely concerned about the customer. I much prefer OZ in this case to SQ. When talking about service in the air, I would normally use the term 'in-flight service' and 'customer service' would be on the ground. SkywalkerLAX didn't specify but I assumed on-the-ground service was implied by the term 'customer service'.

SQ, another 5-star airline, is also well-known for horrible customer service on the ground, and is obviously another Asian based airline. In my experience, SQ is far, far worse than OZ on the ground. Their website however is way better than OZ's. If you're expecting wonderful on-the-ground customer service from an airline, which matches western standards, then I'd recommend one stay away from all Asian airlines.

ethelman

I've had good service from Asiana when things went wrong. Politely refusing to accept initial brush off led to great helpful response (and vouchers).

didgit74

From the European website I found it impossible to book a flight from UK-London to Australia-Sydney it would only let me book London to Korea I ended up booking via a thrid party website.

Mr. Bean

the OP is rather amusing, so I tried to follow the steps posted using Firefox, two months later.

1) "flyasiana.com" is still not working. blank page. but no flash movie now

2) The same, essentially.

3) Same dialog box shows up after selecting flights. sometimes two. 3a and 3b are still the same, too.

4) Login screen still there. Guess I need to make an OZ Club account...

OK, I go through the painless process and am now an OZ Silver

5) Yeah, weird <%@ //include file="../common/avail/FIDomAvail003.jsp"%> message.

6) The fare and number of seats available info is now given.

7) When you click to continue, a new window pops up with fuel surcharge information. Slightly annoying.

Also, I can't find any fare information at all, now which is a bit shocking. I was curious to enroll in the "infant science training course," too

8) You have to choose whether the tickets will be issued in Korea or Overseas. If Overseas, then the same Online Transaction System Message pops up in a new window.

So, all in all, it looks like they've gotten rid of the flash movie that plays when you go to the site, improved the display of available seats, but have gotten rid of fare information.