davidwhitelaw

Is anyone else finding that the website is really a websh!te.

I tried booking a destinations point flight on Monday - it took about 30mins to get to the right page as the pages never loaded correctly. Then there were no seats available for the next 11 months on any 4 of the routes I chose.

A colleague flew with BA from Manchester yesterday - Checked in online as usual - but now able to print the boarding card. Why can't bmi do this.

Comments welcome.

AJLondon

Welcome to FT, davidwhitelaw

I agree that there are flaws in the BD website that need to be ironed out. But that is quite true of other, much bigger, airlines as well. Go to the BA or LH forums and you'll see the complaining that goes on about the respective websites.

Might just be a case of grass is greener on the other side...

I agree. It is always much much easier to book awards by calling the DC phone line. You have to do this for Star awards anyways. How long it'll take them to pick up the bl00dy phone, is another thread altogether.

House

First of all, welcome to Flyertalk! The more regular BMI flyers we get on here the better.

I think at least some of the problem here is that BMI is constrained to some extent by its reliance, for certain systems, on Lufthansa and SAS. This brings certain advantages (for BMI it's cheaper and I can use my Lufthansa frequent flyer card as ID for etickets, for instance). In the long run this kind of cooperation is the way to go, and Star Alliance seem to be miles ahead of Oneworld and Skyteam here.

But BMI are a much smaller airline than BA and this presumably means less money for web development. They seem to borrow certain elements of the website from Lufthansa, for example, but find they have to customise to suit a very different group of customers - witness the teething problems they had with the booking system when they last revamped it. To give them their due, when I've encountered difficulties I have sent an email to the support address through the link on the website, and always got a personal, prompt and helpful reply.

BA's system is not without its problems - there are a few threads running on the BA forum about people being unable to change their seat assignments after checking in online, and teething trouble with accessing the gate areas with a homemade printout.

BA also (annoyingly) won't let me pay for a ticket originating in Belgium using a UK credit card. Until recently they didn't take debit cards. BD have taken debit cards for years and even let me pay for my BRU-originating flights with UK cards, converting the fare automatically into pounds so I don't get stung for foreign exchange fees by my bank. BA tell me to use Expedia (and pay �5 extra) or book over the phone (and pay a EUR20 surcharge).

Similarly, from the UK you can't book a BA flight that doesn;t originate in the UK through BA themselves!

BA, as a result, don't get my personal or business spend very often on this route.

What BMI really needs to be looking at, in terms of IT, are sites like continental.com (seat changes, proper linking of bookings to frequent flyer accounts, paging via SMS of flight details, check-in via SMS, etc). I agree BMI could do better, and the site needs to become much more stable, but they could also do rather worse IMHO.