canadiancow

I find it generally takes 2-3 attempts to get into Altitude.

Adam Smith

2FA on Altitude now too? For f's sake.

canadiancow

It's all or nothing... no point half-assing it.

But I don't get very many of these. In all of 2020, I've had 10.



Granted, that's 10 more than Google's required from me. But if you're getting them significantly more frequently, then I suspect either you're using new devices or clearing cookies. Or somehow trigger other security measures.

alaskaforlife

Is it possible to book an ticket like this?
NRT-SIN-EWR-YVR

The online multi-city doesn't work out

Adam Smith

That's a feature, not a bug. The AC website isn't set up to sell legs fully outside of Canada like that (e.g. NRT-SIN).

Are you actually trying to book a one-way NRT-SIN-EWR-YVR? You could certainly price that on Google Flights or Matrix, but going to be hard getting decent pricing doing that all on one ticket and as a one-way.

capedreamer

Online and mobile check-in for flights to the EU are currently not possible if you do not have a EU passport.

I have a Canadian passport and a EU residency card, so should be allowed to enter the Netherlands, but as soon as I select that I do not have a EU passport, the AC system blocks me from checking in. Also just spoke to a totally clueless Concierge agent who had no idea about any of this.

canadiancow

I'm not sure how much I'd consider that a technical issue over a policy issue. As a Canadian citizen who has resided in the US without a green card (i.e. on TN-1 or H-1B), I can't tell you how many airline checkin systems wouldn't let me get a boarding pass.

They wanted a human looking at anything "suspicious".

capedreamer

Yeah maybe this is not the right thread for it but I wanted an outlet to share somewhere for 2 reasons:

1) The unspecific error message provided following a questionnaire that only asks about EU passport (and not residency) may leave a traveler with the impression that he or she will not be allowed to enter the EU / board the flight. This is inaccurate.

2) Phone agents who are unfamiliar with current entry requirements can cause further confusion / anxiety for uninformed travelers. The first Concierge agent I spoke to

1. first tells me that a Canadian passport is sufficient for entering the EU with no need for a EU passport, residency, or visa (apparently totally unaware of current entry restrictions)
2. then (after I suggested this might be covid related) changes tune and tells me that I need both a EU passport and a EU residency permit for this trip;
3. finally (after I challenge his assertion) blurts out (almost as a non sequitur) that if I'm denied boarding, Air Canada is not responsible for re-accommodating me (thanks...)

I decided to HUCA and thankfully, the second agent was totally clear and certain about the actual policies and confirmed that I just need to see an airport agent tomorrow with my residency card and won't have an issue.

canadiancow

On the do last night, we were discussing some issues that crop up in Gmail, including how it relates to some messages from AC, in particular, booking confirmations from Aeroplan (titled "SCOTT , your Aeroplan Flight Reward confirmation").

If you have more than just a few segments, you end up with an email truncated at the end:



The clipping happens if an email body exceeds 102 KB, based on various unofficial online references.

The email in question here is 151 KB, which is why it was clipped.

I took a look at the body, and it's a bunch of formatted HTML.

When I say formatted, what I mean is it looks like this:




The above is 202 characters. The email was encoded in UTF-8, so that also means it's 202 bytes.

In HTML, 2 spaces are equivalent to 1 space everywhere. In most cases, you don't even need spaces, but a very simple optimization would be to remove duplicate whitespace characters, so it looks like this:


That brings it down to 154 bytes, a 24% reduction. As an aside, FT keeps trying to strip the extra spaces in the first block, so I had to be careful when I finally submitted this post to ensure they showed up.

However, in the real email, each of those lines was actually indented with an additional 72 spaces. That means the original section was actually 778 bytes, and the shrunken version would still be 154, which is actually an 80% reduction in size.

If we perform this simple replacement (i.e. replace("\s+", " ")), the 151 KB becomes 67 KB. That's a 56% decrease in message body size. Aside from the general benefits of saving time (for AC's servers and our own browser loading) and money (it costs money to transmit data), this also means it's now below Gmail's clipping limit, and can be displayed in its entirety, which I was easily able to test. Now I can see the entire itinerary, cost, tax breakdown, disclaimers, etc., without having to click to open a new tab.

However, that was a naive solution. For example, "</td> </tr> </table> </td>" can just as easily be "</td></tr></table></td>". Those spaces were unnecessary. There are also HTML comments, which are completely unnecessary here. Comments are useful for developers looking at code, but they serve no practical purpose to the end user looking at the rendered result.

Using a proper HTML minifier, which removes all unnecessary whitespace, comments, etc., we get it down to 59 KB, or a 61% reduction.

Adam Smith

I won't quote the whole post for the sake of space, but nicely done

Not being a very tech-y guy, does this not seem like HTML 101 or something that the people at AC/Aeroplan should know how to do?

canadiancow

Minification is certainly more modern than a lot of other practices. When you write HTML, you want it formatted cleanly so it's easy for you to read and edit. But certainly when I started working, it really wasn't happening much. A lot of HTTP servers will do it automatically for you these days, but I'm not sure how that ties in to emails.

However, I can't find this style of email before 2016. It seems like I was just getting a PDF before then, so it's fairly recent. I don't know anyone at old Aeroplan though, so I have no idea whether any of this was inhouse or outsourced.

United.com seems to be doing it on their main site for most of their content.
AC.com is not. It's 1155 KB (!!!!!! that does not even include images !!!!!!), and could be 676 KB (still huge, but way smaller).

Anyway, to answer your question, yes, I'm a little surprised it's not happening at least on their website, but that's not causing a visible problem, so I can see how one might overlook it (but that should also be fixed). The email is causing a visible problem.

Adam Smith

Is that why the AC homepage is so slow to load?

I know cash is tight at AC these days, but it sounds like you could really improve a lot of stuff there. Maybe they could bring you on as a consultant, pay you in AQM or Aeroplan miles or something. Or would you work for AQD or eUps?

canadiancow

Well it certainly doesn't help, but I suspect that if the minified version is that large, the actual rendering is going to be the bottleneck. But I agree it's slow.

Are you saying I shouldn't have fired off an email about this already?

eUps aren't worth much, but I'd take MM-eligible AQM

recreationaltimetraveller

Sounds like they should be using tabs instead of spaces!

canadiancow

Where's the dislike button.