mooper

As I detailed previously, just from the IT perspective.

Ah yes, the beauty of regulations. Too bad Sarbanes-Oxley can't be expanded to be twice as intrusive! If Delta doesn't do a good enough job making their awards system appealing, it hurts their profits... it hardly qualifies as something the government should involve itself with.


Fair point, though I wouldn't go as far as saying they need to be canned. More beta testing might suffice.

DiscoPapa

I am guessing that you are a fellow auditor, haha.

jfulcher

This isn't the only rollout they've messed up. This is one of many.

DeltaWebDev

most of the time i would agree, and i do exactly as you recommend. in this case specifically though i disagree in the sense that staying silent is not the right thing to do. you read through the whole thread and get a sense that my coworkers and i are incompetent. none of the posts read like an attack on me, especially since many make a point to separate me out of the "fault group." it wouldn't matter if i was included as i'd rather be here taking insults while acknowledging the complaints & suggestions exists over silently lurking like i did for three years. its not pretty, but its a role that needs to be filled.

no, its absolutely nothing close to that. its because discussions surrounding the calendar (or the award ticket application in general) usually turns into a discussion about the skymiles program. at that point it seems to go directly into opinions, so it makes it hard to have a discussion without having opinions about the program entering into it. for instance, i wrote the blog about the award ticket calendar to explain the difference in search methodologies (and why) between the calendar results and the itinerary results (select flights). while just being straight facts, it still generated discussions about the program policies and rules. so its sensitive to me because i should not (and will not) comment on the program policies. plus, those policies and rules are applied prior to my job duties dealing with the resulting data. the rules, etc are applied centrally so that the same rules and policies are applied across all channels (phone, web, etc). does all that make sense as to why its a sensitive topic? if not i am more than happy to try explaining again, but i hope this covers it.

so that's now going to be my next blog. most likely it will go live while i'm on vacation (i leave next thursday), so following up in the comments will be hit or miss while overseas. i'm working through this weekend, so as part of that i will put together a fairly lengthy post regarding the development process and cycle. i'm also no longer going to allow myself any excuse for not providing at least one blog a week in regards to development. there is a lot of hypothesis here in regards to how things are developed, many of which are incorrect. hopefully that will start providing some "meat" for discussions. that also brings up the topic of the missing blog i linked. i did not remove it. in fact i was busy enough that i was unaware until after 4pm that it was no longer available. i didn't have a chance to think about removing the link and it wasn't until this morning that i even logged the time i worked on tuesday. on the bright side of leaving it, i did get a giggle out of the comments around the 404 error. i don't think everyone has that same sense of humor so i might have to edit the post later to not have the link. but then i'll have to come back and relink it as the blog post was "unpublished" and it should be back soon.

and fyi, sorry it took so long to make a more substantial post. i opted to use my lunch to follow up here. i would have quoted and commented on more posts but there's only so much time in the day.

safigan

Multi-city functionality still not working for me ("one or more flights just sold out" message). This is a long darned time for this not to work at all-- how many thousands of award flights are people trying to book right now without success? The message about why they're not successful is false, and I suspect is known to be false by DL.

GrizShel

I absolutely appreciate and applaud your high level of participation here. Sadly though, even if the technical hurdles are overcome and Delta going forward has the best booking system in the world, I am fearful that the Award policies are what's really going to drive me away from Delta after my current primary airline NW gets folded in with them.

Right now, it is so much trouble to use Delta's award booking process I mostly don't even mess with it - I can book trips soooo much more easily with my AA, UA (Caveat: UA is more reliably easy to use for North American travel), and NW (but getting worse there), and that's w/o having any status in either AA or UA.

mooper

I think it would be fair and productive if everyone in this forum agreed to not harass you nor even discuss the fees, mileage levels, and similar details of Skymiles in the interest of helping you and your team improve the technology by focusing on technical issues only. I will start by pledging to do my best to give you useful feedback on the site operation, exclusive of what it wants to charge me.

Getting the ball rolling... you've discussed multiple times that data parsing challenges and computing limitations that are behind some of the calendar accuracy issues. This is understandable. Now that the look an ease of use is pretty solid (I know some disagree, but its pretty clear that at the very least, they are reasonable), I'd suggest putting a lot of focus on that accuracy issue. Would it be worthwhile to examine how AA's calendar works in this respect, as it seems to be extremely accurate and user friendly at the same time? I presume they share many of the same computational and data constraints, and yet their system seems to deal with them accurately. Do you have any insight into their solutions, and if so, is there a way you could use them as guidance?

stevenryals

good idea, i'm with that..

I've liked the new calendar what I've been able to see of it..

however, I get a lot of the "lets try that again" messages #7000 #7550 # 7005 when doing multi city searches, specific to BHM-FCO:VCE-BHM (what i've been searching anyway)...
Hope error #'s help, I can post them if I run into them and give the circumstances from which they occurred..

thanks webdev guy..

ukguy78

While this may be straying somewhat from the topic of the online award functionality, I for one would REALLY like to see a breakdown of the taxes/surcharges for these award tickets. I have a hard time with the "take our word for it" mentality. Show me what I'm actually paying for.

arcticgrin

The price of the rt fight to Hawaii I looked for this summer went down from 70k to on 65k now at the new Medium level.

phundoo

Looks like delta forgot to increase mileage requirements for award flights in September, 50000 mile tickets still available to europe.

StayingHomeIsBetter

If that was true, I am sure that they would be quite appreciative of you tipping them off to the fact so they could correct their error.

Hint... start brain before starting typing

rbwpi

Were you the kid in my 6th grade class, who at the end of the day asked the teacher, "Is there any homework?"

whynotgo

I am searching for low mileage flights from Washington DC to Bangkok.
This is NOT working

Savage25

+1