I'd say you are right.
At a meeting at HOTT (talking about seats and services), I spoke to one of the hired consultants about the booking engine. When he realised we were FT'ers, he turned to his AY overlord and excitedly said:
- Oh, you really should get these guys in a room with the developers. They know more about your systems than anyone inhouse.
The reply from AY rep was polite but reserved. It wasn't something they were interested in or saw the benefit of.

To some extent they'd be right to exclude the margin cases. But a lot of what power users need is also appreciated by the casual user. Speed, accuracy, ease of use, consistency and so on. These are general requirements. And if you make the background right, with functions for all use cases, you can still easily make one simple interface for generic "cheapest r/t between common city-pairs" and one interface for advanced bookings.
Instead of making the background functions right, it seems they are always only interested in appearance or similar frontend issues. Like this change, where the overall goal was to create a mobile booking site with the result they had to dumb down the main site. Not only did they enforce a mobile interface on desktop users, but they also removed basic search&book capabilities. Incomprehensible.

Chief Devaluation Officer?

Not one week ago the new CDO was quoted by Finnish financial media saying Jolla (the company he's curently serving) is going through a tough time but will survive with the additional funding now secured. I guess taking up a new position at this point in time also says something about Jolla's future...

Surprised Jolla is still around, should have been gone longtime ago

This new CDO for AY, He left Jolla in 2015.

Who are the developers? I know lot of finnish IT developers due to active Boozembly participation over the years...And not the managers but the actual grunts :)

Not sure, the guy I was talking to was some kind of facilitator or project manager. But I think a lot of tasks are outsourced.
I think we have one or two IT-related AY guys on here somewhere, but I guess they are acting uboats rather than participating.

Yet was interviewed by Kauppalehti as CEO of the company only 8 days ago (https://www.kauppalehti.fi/uutiset/n...9-6234ebebb743)

2 letter difference, that is Sami and AY CDO from 01OCT is Tomi. ;)

I guess he had to change name before getting the job at AY ;)


But seriously, did his brother inherit the CEO position at Jolla? Or just a coincident?

Back to the discussion whether or not the site is considered a success. From their half year report, the news about the site is told as a success or at least not highlighted as a problem area. The number of visitors are down a whopping 22%, but the only explanation given is that "The measurement method was changed in Q2 2018 due to EU GDPR. "

Quota of tickets sold on "digital channels" are slightly up, while ancillary revenue is down.
To know the impact of the new site, one has to look at these numbers over time, and also normalise them to the variable number of pax.

It is not very scientific, but the impact of the new site on me, is that if there would be consistent ways to buy value tickets from somewhere else, I would not go anywhere close to the new Finnair website. The previous version had its fair share of issues, but this one managed to under perform it at an unimaginable level. It is seriously a pain to buy a ticket from them now. A simple return ticket is still possible (barely), but last time I tried to buy a "complex" (not) multi city ticket, I ended up in an endless loop of going back and forth between the "old" and the "new" site. The new site says that you need to go to the old one to book a multi city ticket. As soon as I want to go to the old site, the stupid login splash screen comes up (at least twice), even though I was already logged in and then it took me back to the new site...

Very simple. Someone(s) at AY are paid by increasef number of traffic on website. Okay they have made each time the webpage catastrophically worse, which requires more clicking around and coming back, so traffic nr increases. At the same time customer satisfaction goes down. Nuff said.
If they designed a wonderfully working booking engine, the numbers would go down since people just would come and book with simple few steps easily and their dwelling on webpages would be low. Oh thats not what AY wants. Nuff said.

Oh yes, I would love to get paid per click on the Finnair website, a little extra for every repeated clicks and a little more extra for every time the user starts over from the start to escape the loop of hel again and again. That's a business model for sure!

I think 1 point per click would be a fair deal. Additional 1000 points for every successfully completed transaction (ticket purchase). They could also apply tier multipliers.