AY IT
 

Just booked an award, got multiple problems while doing it online, so I called AY, they are telling me the cost of the two tickets will be 19.000€ read 19.000€, the email wich confirmed the booking was 240€. So it looks like AY have to work on their IT.

Also both tickets are on my name, even if I booked them on the account of my wife, but payed with my credit card - strange thing.

And even we did the booking from my wifes account, half of the points are charged from my account - and at no point I put in my AY number, this is totally strange.

After some time on the hotline everything is fixed - but for the future I only will use a credit card linked to the name of the account holder

It looks like there are more enhancements on the IT side. If I want to select my seat I need to provide my credit card details to settle the price of EUR 0 for my seats.

In general, I don't think these selection pages are very frequent flier friendly as all the wordings have been chosen as if all the passengers were always travelling in economy without any status but now it looks like this goes one step further.

I also recently had massive break down booking awards involving several people via webpage. In my case the confirmation page never loaded, finnair.com just responded with an empty page. As no confirmation mail arrived, I was sure the transaction was lost and went back to book it again. By coincidence I checked my MMB and to my surprise the booking was there.


Some parts of the awards booking is using the new pages and from what I noticed, there is no way you even can put in travellers FF numbers. I guess the number of the booker is fetched automatically from your log in session. They even put that FF# in all travellers in the FQTR field.

Doesn't explain the charging to different accounts though, that is pretty odd. Maybe it is their "ever-cookie" (they store things in cookies they use even when not logged in) and their poorly session handling that messed it up. They just fetched data from different sessions and were able to mess different accounts up.

Yes, their development efforst seems to start with one single scenario and one single purpose - all users are non-frequent flyers buying the cheapest; how can we extract more money from them?

I also had issues with AY IT this morning. In addition to the by now quite familiar "Generic errors", logging in was slow, difficult and sometimes even impossible. When I finally had managed to purchase the ticket, upgrading didn't work (in the app or on the website) despite the availability tool showing 5+. I called CS who said they are not seeing any ug availability, but promised to call back. They did in three minutes and everything was finally sorted out.

Hasn't been this hard in a while.

Saw this as well. Called CS and they said this is a fault that appeared today and they already have made a ticket of it. And confirmed the seats for me.

There's also something going on with adding the AY+ FF number to a booking manually. Yesterday tried on the web page, no success - but managed to add it on the Android app.

Today tried to add another booking - Android app claimed the booking cannot be found, iPhone app claimed there's already another FF number, Web page showed that the right number was there (the Android app probably managed to add it despite the error message)

And I have had this issue too. It was sorted after 20 hours, what i assume was the round-trip-time to get Rev management to release more seats. So either the tool is showing phantom availability or call center cannot access awards seats freely anymore.

If more people have this issue, I suggest making complaints about it.

I could not select seats on AY, so I went to the AB website, try to made seat reservations, I also need to provide credit card details for a 0€ bill - but then the website replied that they can t handle my reservation due to high demand:o Did check my reservation on AY and I got the seats there confirmed - with no email from AB - this IT thing is just not working.

In all fairness, AY's IT is still working better than BA's :D

While this statement is factually true, you are also comparing apples with oranges.

BA had a huge meltdown in one or more its *core* systems - the ones that are absolutely essential for the airline to be able to issue tickets, boarding passes, board and operate flights etc.

All the things about Finnair that have been discussed in this thread concern *auxiliary* systems, namely their self-service systems - the website, seat reservation etc.

The difference is that even none of the Finnair systems would work, the airline would still be able to operate and do things the old fashioned way. BA couldn't do even that.

Actually if you follow the lean development methodology that is exactly where you should start from - the MVP. Get that working well and rolled out to the customers fast and then start building additional stuff on top of that with small, incremental and frequent releases.

I thought "Lean" was the Toyota model of empowering workers? But anyway, yes there are ideas in the software development industry that works this way. Producing endless releases of software that isn't quite finished but unstable and feature-poor and where no-one in the project is responsible for getting the product developed in any certain direction. Bells&whistles are always prioritized over true function and solid groundwork like usecases and software architecture is laughed at.

- Hey! Let's start with one base function, make it really good and then we can expand from there!
- OK, good idea! I'll get right on it!



Two years later.

- Hey, why isn't this version stable?!
- Beats me. We started out with the most important thing and when we expanded we made sure every single building block was solid.
- And what a beauty it is! No one has ever seen anyting like it!
- So true! Anyway, the money is up, so hand it over to the customer quickly so we can move on to the next project!


http://cogiw.org/images/stock/hi/ups...Pyramid-hi.jpg

My qualification period and my required flights looked yesterday also very unusual.

Gamification?
 

I wonder if this feature of the new web page is part of the gamification they are so into?