Finnair User Experience sessions stuff [separated from Meeting with AY+ Loyalty]
 

This is about an issue we raised yesterday. I will leave all other issues with UX out of this, as I feel the need to immediately highlight this specific problem as clearly as possible. The problem has existed for a long time but has gotten worse with the new UX. And with the airline business getting more and more complex, with more airline-to-airline co-operations, this problem will only get worse with time.



In the attached image, I've done a search for a simple return flight, CPH-AKL, in business. Finnair offers several options, but they are not all what they seem.

If you examine it closely, option one turns out to be ticketed on NZ. I am savvy enough to realise I will earn 0 points for that flight, and that I will not be able enjoy tier perks like the first class lounge in HKG. Most Finnair plus members might not be as savvy.
Sorry Finnair, no deal on option 1.

Option two is shown as a AY/CX combo and indeed that is true. However, it books into an economy seat. This information is hidden and the loyal member needs to be really savvy to notice it before buying. N.B! that this economy-ticket has the exact same price as the true business class ticket!
If my respons to option 1 was "no deal", this one gets a "h*ll no deal".


I feel really sorry for those who gets tricked into buying the CX-ticket. That is an 11 hour flight, on top of the 18 hours you already spent on the road.
For me personally, I've learned that you can't trust the booking engine, and I just stay away from Finnair on this and simlar routes.

But the major point here, in terms of loyalty and revenue for you, is: If the options you provide is either

none of these options are interesting to a Finnair plus member who wants to fly business class.

You really need to
a) make it perfectly clear who the marketed airline is, and make it clear what that means in terms of loyalty-related things (no status perks, no points et.c.)
and
b) either stop selling mixed class tickets under the lable "Business class" or make it extremely clear that despite the customer explicitly asking for a business class flight, you are only offering economy seating but at business class prices.


http://content.screencast.com/users/...c/00000078.png

If you search HEL-ALK on ANZ, they offer the same AY/NZ interlines (plus the HEL-LHR-LAX-AKL one, which Finnair won't sell you for obvious reasons). They do however rather clearly state that *A benefits do not apply on the AY segments.

That being said, I think it's actually a good thing that interline tickets are available from Finnair.com. The real problem is the lack of clarity.

Intuition, you should get paid for doing this. What a favour for AY!

Very good examples of why the AY booking engine is just terrible.

Eg. on AA, you can force the engine to search only AA, only oneworld or everything. By limiting yourself to oneworld, you won't end up with option #1 in this case.

When you search using ITA, sometimes they come up with J fares where they seat you in Y on some segments. But at least they tell you very clearly in red print that some segments are Y. I've ended up with this same glitch on AY a couple of times, and it's very frustrating. If I pick J from the menu, I do not want to see anything with Y included. If no J is available, why not give an error message asking you to search again...

Another example where the booking engine fails: there are longhaul fares that allow multiple stopovers. Perhaps one at no charge and one at a set charge, say €150. But it is very difficult to try to book these – and if you want two stopovers, it's practically impossible on the AY website. While I do understand that probably 95 % of the cases are simple returns and thus it might not pay off to create a more advanced booking engine, it certainly is frustrating when you need to book something more complex and the site just can't handle it so you are forced to book with an OTA.

I think that for advanced users, such as FT:ers and AY Plats the best thing is always to have as many options as possible. This means that searching for Only AY, OW or everything is good, but it needs to be clear what is happening and when. It is very unfortunate that it is currently searching "everything" and throwing up some of the worst [for the flyer anyway] options first.

It is disastrous that it doesn't highlight non-business legs very clearly.

Ideally from a FT:er perspective we want very flexible booking sites that when using advanced features allows a lot of flexibility. Options that allow this are AA and UA. However it may not be something that Finnair finds rewarding enough, financially, to build. However, if not building a website that can handle advanced bookings it is generally so that there are competent phone booking agents that do NOT charge a booking fee on other airlines!

I have booked with AA and BA many times by phone when their websites fail to book what I want, at no cost. And both those websites are ahead of AY in terms of flexibility. Especially the AA multi-city tool is quite flexible if you know how to play with it. (Search e.g. LON-MEM when you want to find LHR-JFK-CLT-MEM and you are not limited to actual 6 legs by the search)

edit: I think that really we need a small session with the booking/website people to understand how we are booking tickets and what problems we run into. It would also help if the IT people tried to book tickets on some other airline websites to see how flexible (or inflexible) they are.

I can supply a number of rather advanced real bookings I have flewn over the last few years as test projects... Stopovers tend to cause issues, inability to search for enough legs, limitations to number of airports used, airport changes, inability to force booking classes and more.

Thanks for this feedback! I checked with our booking engine team and they are very keen to invite you to the user tester group. Who's in? F2F sessions would be in Helsinki.

I am definitely interested, if I can make it fit my rather tight schedule. Even if I cannot make it I can try to support some discussion material.

I'm In. :)

I can volunteer as test rabbit. I've had some headaches with the booking engine too and I would always prefer to book AY online.

One more guinea pig here :)

This would be very interesting. I'm in! ^

Definitely interested. I'd also like to talk about the possibility of some kind of API access for the booking engine (personal use only).

I am interested. Hopefully the schedule allows.

I am interested to participate as well if the schedule allows.

I'm in. My itineraries aren't that complex, but commenting on the user experience is definitely interesting.

Interested as well...