Originally Posted by
Paralytic
Some browsers share the user's "session" across multiple tabs, others don't. The "session" is used to store the information about your booking, as you go from page to page.
Well aware of that, I work with IT, and have relatively deep knowledge of the browser / server interaction area. (relatively deep for general IT, guru level compared to layman)
So, if you had two tabs open on ba.com, doing the same process (booking) your interactions on one tab could overwrite your session data that was previously stored from your interaction with the other tab.
I suspect this is what has happened here.
This used to be a huge issue back in early web booking setups. It was even worse before cross site scripting was protected, you could get situations where another site just using the same variable names would cause chaos.
These days, and if we are talking about sessions updating the state back at the server, it is also an issue if people think they are on separate sites, but it is actually just a framed white label, with all the interaction going direct to megahotelconentrator.xyz, etc. In the users mind, they only have one tab open with X.
This is why any DECENT booking system, or indeed any interaction system, sends (upon the pressing of the submit button), a reference to what the state was when the submission form was generated.
As a result, if you have a system whereby activity in another tab has changed 'the basket', the timestamped reference number for the state update of the basket will now not match with the one being returned by the submit button.
So you do not accept the submit, you return the updated basket state to the user to submit again.
Did you ask about the 24 hour cooling off period - cancel and then rebook?
Sadly the flight is within 24 hours, so they said they couldn't do anything with it. "Throw it away and start again".
"What you are describing doesn't happen".
- Fine way to speak to a Gold card holder.
And, as I said, I've done this without issue in IE, FF and Safari many many times for years. If I'm about to book something less than ideal, I just go back and do a a final check (headline, not advanced) for availability on the original thing I wanted (in a different tab) to confirm it is still not available, before hitting submit on the one I want.
End users should be entitled to site behaviour stability across the latest versions of main popular browsers.
As I said, some may indeed share the session, but there are ways around that to prevent problems, or flag if another window has changed something.