The on-line booking tool has been refreshed. I'm not calling it a new version because it looks pretty much the same as the old version. I've being playing with it for a few days now and the following are my impressions so far

Disclaimer:

I was aware that this change was in the works, and four weeks ago was invited to an on-line preview of what was coming

During the preview I asked if the way the tool (mis-)interpreted the rules was being fixed – the answer was that they were aware of the issues and they will be addressed in the next release; this release is to improve the user experience(!)

I also asked if there will be a facility to provide feedback – the answer was no; when they did have a facility they found that most of the queries were to do with particular itineraries the users were building, not with the tool's functionalities/bugs

Overview

The flow of the tool – its data entry process and results display etc – is still pretty much the same; the main difference is that you must enter the dates for each segment on the 1st screen rather than on the 2nd screen

The First Screen

You can no longer quickly enter a list of Airports/Cities; neither can you click points on a map (the screen does display your itinerary on a map, but you cannot use the map for data entry)

Each segment of your itinerary must be entered – From, To, Date

The 'From' field of the next segment is auto-populated with the 'To' field of the previous segment. This can be overwritten, which is one way to specify a surface segment (the other way I've found is to enter a segment and then later delete it); there is no explicit way to enter a surface segment (the old version had a tick box for this purpose)

After playing with this screen for a while, I found I could quickly enter a complete itinerary – I would enter the first 'From/To' pair, followed by all the other 'To's (the 'From's are auto-populated) and then I'd enter all the dates

Once you've entered a complete itinerary, the 'Choose Flights' button becomes active

The Transition from First to Second Screen

When you press the "Choose Flights' button a pop-up warns that it may take up to 120 seconds to 'Search and Price' the itinerary

The search is finding the shortest duration flight/s for each segment and the itinerary is priced up using those flights

The results are displayed on the second screen

My takeaway from this transition is that if you just wanting to price up some tentative itineraries then this can be done quite quickly (and certainly more quickly than in the old version)

The Second screen

The second screen's initial display is of the shortest three flights for the first segment

At the top of the screen is a ribbon showing all the segments, and you can click in any segment to see the three flights selected for that segment

Scrolling down, there is a button to 'Show More' flights for the segment

At the bottom of the screen the total price is displayed and a button to move to the next segment (this button changes to "Review Itinerary" when the last segment's flights are being displayed). If you select different flights, the total price is recalculated

This screen works quite well IMHO

Later Screens

I haven't checked these out yet. They are: Review Flights/Enter Passenger Details/Book Itinerary