WilcoRoger

Just opening the finnair.fi site, my browser blocks the following

Disconnect plugin blocks

- 3 google social elements
- 1 facebook social element
- 2 advertising elements (zanox, nugg.ad)
- 2 analyzing elements (inspectlet)
- 5 content elements (microsoft, wingify)

Ad block plus blocks
- 2 amazonaws javascripts
- 1 bat.bing.com javascript
- frc.hero element on finnair.com

Small wonder the site normally takes ages to load

intuition

Add a filter for to remove the annoying animation that tells you their chat is currently closed..

intuition

When we were at HOTT, I think they asked what could be done to improve award search. If someone from AY is still listening, I'd like to post an example from ANA.

It is an award calendar where you just select a zone and a class of service and they will in a second list ALL scheduled ANA flights within the next 180 days with an availability marker. Here I have found a red 'maru' on the SIN-NRT in economy on AUG 25.

Checking other fare classes or dates is just a flip of a switch. It displays almost instantaneously.
Each screen shows availability on all flights over 2 months. This can't naturally not be displayed on the screen at the same time, but you can scroll sideways for any date in the period. ALL data is loaded in the screen, there is no extra detour to the database when scrolling.

Clicking on a 'maru' marker sets the date for your desired flight, and available returns are marked with yellow. Clicking on your return date pre-loads this data into the regular award booking engine. This step is needed because the calendar is batch-loaded every night. But they have made it extremely simple. So if availability still is there, you can book it with a few clicks. And you won't spend a lot of time searching on dates/destination that simply has no seats.


This seems ideal to me.

I realize that Finnair has some other challenges. ANA is more a point-to-point airline, and a Finnair calendar would need to feature a lot of shorthaul connecting flights, ie the result-set is larger. The ANA tool does however cope with some connections - not all destinations listed in the tool are direct flights, some of them are ANA-ANA connections.

Also, Finnair has far fewer longhaul destinations than ANA, so the Zone-selector could instead be a departure selector, say one for each country.

Also, the speed. ANA site is not blazingly fast but this tool could find me that SIN flight award a lot quicker than Finnair can return the bl00dy override.action...

Rikiz81

I just keep on wondering why Finnair does not fix the override-problem. It has been there so long time and people cannot change the seats without calling to Platinum desk. I could not imagine that my company would let that kind of "errors" to be alive that long.

ff_flyer

Well, be patient: the symptoms will disappear when the online check-in opens @:-)
Witnessed the issue yesterday when a friend of mine tried to change his seat with no success. Advised him to call AY, but he just gave up and changed the seat online this morning. Problem solved!

Seriously: this is apparently quite widespread problem since when I called them ~2 weeks ago the lady just said: "Right, I know the problem, please hold on a minute". She murmured about the issue being out of AY's control or something....go and figure out.

ff_flyer

Next one to call AY with this matter could try to fish out some more information about this nuisance.

Or even better, is FinnairPlusRep alive and monitoring (knock, knock...)

intuition

Still the same issue with Override.action. A variant of the issue is the webpage endlessly looping on the RequestAdditionalInformation.action

Insane.

jmmi

I just made some seat reservations via e-mail, mentioning the problem. Their comment to the issue was "Vika on tosiaan tiedossamme ja sitä yritetään kyllä kovasti korjata" – I like the formulation ("Indeed, we are aware of the bug and they are trying hard to fix it") but based on it wouldn't hold my breath for a quick fix...

ff_flyer

So, sounds like the issue is not on AY webpage itself but on an underlying system or mechanism.
It would never take 3+ weeks to fix an issue on a webpage unless it is dependent on an external application or data source in some way.
Amadeus?

lkrt

Definitely not Amadeus. Amadeus has got nothing to do with the Override.actions, which is just poor web back-end.

ff_flyer

Fair enough, and makes AY development teams even more quilty to suddenly introduce a defect and not finding a solution in 3 weeks.

intuition

But the code used seems to be shared with many airlines. Take a look at the resource path

..../pl/AIRLINE_NAME/wds/override.action

used everywhere (flysas, lufthansa, saudiair...). I assume WDS is a Webb-version of GDS?

But even if it is shared code it seems only AY web servers present it to browsers as a downloadble file.

lkrt

Hmm... You're right. Might be Amadeus, not the reservation system itself, but more like an API or something of Amadeus.

I would be intrigued to hear more about how the GDS actually works with a website.

Hartsa

Maybe AY's servers f* up with the MIME type?

heatsink

Today I received an email in which my status was shown as Gold rather than Platinum. Within three and a half hours, I received another email apologizing for the error.

I feel that this was a remarkably quick reaction given that it was a rather unimportant newsletter. I hadn't even noticed. ^