It allows you to choose to not have your ticket processed for EUA, if that makes you happy. I'd rather have 1 in F and 1 in Y almost every time, so it isn't useful to me, but for folks who don't want to split their party between cabins it isn't so bad.

So now you have to go in and turn this on all the time for an UG? Stupid

So instead of booking separately or having your records split this keeps the elite or high revenue flyer sitting in the back with your non-elite partner or low revenue travel companions ... and the seat up front goes to someone else. Yeah I can see that not being too useful to most.

Looks like it defaults to on unless you choose to turn it off

bingo on all points. on your last point, this is a great way to turn goodwill (letting us see it first) into bad will (only giving us four days, not making changes, and not returning emails).

It defaults to the "normal" behavior of assuming that you do want the upgrade.

I think it was a positive first step - i'm sure some issues need to be worked out before we have an open testing dialog between customers and IT. I somehow doubt (as an IT person myself) that CO's IT managers were thrilled at the prospect of letting customers go through their beta site and report bugs.

Many IT organizations exist with a very formal and highly structured culture - and that lends itself to how bugs and issues are reported. I'm sure they have a formal structure and language for reporting bugs and problems, and letting customers send emails with 'this doesn't work' and 'I can't do xxx, when I'm trying to yyy with zzz' is possibly outside their comfort zone.

Give it time :)

When I went into my account and pulled up existing reservations they were all turned "off".

Are you sure about that? All itineraries I see are default to "On".

"On" meaning the word "On" in black, and the word "Off" in clickable blue.

that is completely irrelevant. IT people may not like it, but getting testers to hammer a system before it goes live is pretty important, if you ask me. and, CO didn't just get any testers, it got: 1) free testers, 2) enthusiastic testers, 3) and knowledgeable testers (i.e., they will know when something doesn't look right as opposed to clueless testers). these free/enthusiastic testers are also probably some of CO best customers that are doing this out of genuine interest/curiosity (that is the same reason these people go to the DO).

so, i can't imagine that the fact that the IT people might not like it would carry any weight with continental (CO) upper management.

I think this is where corporate IT needs to meet the world of "the more useful information I have, the better".

As an IT person you understand how hard it is for an organization to track down bugs. So why not let someone else do it for free? Yeah, you'll get a ton of bug reports but that doesn't mean you have to fix them immediately, you simply put them in order and fix them accordingly.

Most IT organizations embace beta testing by outsiders since it actually puts the product through real-world situations, many of which the developers may not have tried. And generally this effort is performed for free to the company. Heck, Microsoft is often accused of the RTM version of any product being beta and having the early adopters be their "free" testers, but that's probably a whole different thread. As for the varied issue reporting styles, many folks who are so keen to be testers have some IT background and we know how to file detailed bug reports. I'm not saying that they are going to be in the same format as an internal tester, but I didn't just write that the flight status check didn't work. I actually explained out click-by-click the steps to reproduce the errors. I'm reasonably confident that others did as well based on some of the comments on this thread and others.

As an "IT person [your]self," I'd hope that you'd be willing to an open and interactive pilot/beta program with any effort that you're going to be releasing to your end-users. If not, I think you're approaching the job from the wrong angle.

I applaud CO's efforts on this front, and, like I said, I'm willing to write this first iteration off as growing pains. But they do need to consider that they should be looking to fix the issues as part of the beta cycle, not just gather our feedback and loop it all into the next release. If they were going to do that then there's no need for a preview program, as we'd give that feedback whenever it actually is released ;)

Exactly. The one bit I'll add is that most beta programs exist so that the issues can be fixed before the release to the public, not just to generate an issues list. I think that CO did poorly on that front this time around based on the limited time available for testing, much of which was on a weekend when the code had already been staged to push into production. The developers barely had a chance to read our bug reports, much less prioritize or consider resolution options, before the site was released.

S.

In response to the last few posts, my comments were insights into the possible mindset of CO's IT people...not comments on the validity of outside testing.

I happen to be a huge champion of outside testing - in fact, my job role is a key interface between my company's own pool of testers, the developers and the product managers.

Since maturing our own 'everyones a beta tester' program, we've improved the quality of the product going out the door to our real customers by leaps and bounds.

I know from my own experience that getting buy-in from some IT stakeholders was a challenge - namely, they had their own distinct processes for collecting and collating test results, and were not happy being the intermediaries collecting unstructured reports from testers. Once that challenge was ironed out, it was smooth sailing and lots of enthusiasm.

It's Back!
 

The preview site is coming back. I just received the email:

The reply email was actually to a different email address than the one that sent it, so a basic reply would have failed. Hopefully this time CO will give us sufficient time in the testing to actually fix the issues that come up.

S.

yeah, "reply" meant click on the link... if that's an indication of the preview site... OY VEY!

I hit the reply link as well. Hopefully all the EQMs, etc. are also fixed. I've also recently noticed that I can't sign into my account from Firefox. I have to switch to IE to get in...not good.