For two days now, I've attempted to book some eAward tickets on HA. Yesterday, all I got was an error message about their system not being able to book the tickets. I called yesterday evening. After waiting on hold for a while, I was told that they were aware of the problem and had escalated it to their IT department.

I tried again this morning and got the same error message. The only "fix" the IT department did was to throw up a message on the search pages that their system was experiencing a high volume and you'd get error messages, blah, blah, blah....

Why don't they allow me to go ahead and book the tix by phone if the web site obviously doesn't work?

I work in IT (as a consultant). I can't fathom letting a revenue generating web site like a booking engine for an airline go this long with such a wide spread problem.

Probably because it was the New years holiday, and the tech staff was off. I expect it should be fixed today. Good Luck!

Except I was trying January 2nd, not 1st...

Their web site is still strange today and the phones have been weird since the holidays. Hard to get through, which can't be good for business. Between that and all of the flight delays and cancellations....

I tried again today and still no luck. Just for grins, I tried to see how far I could go in purchasing a ticket. It got me to the click her to purchase step. I guess fixing the freebies isn't a high priority.

Maybe if they'd quit giving away their seats at fire sale prices and concentrated on customer service, they might actually get things sorted out.

Dear George:

The award site works fine for me, right now: I get all the way to "click Here to purchase"; so I don't know what's wrong on your end.

P.S.: HA webtech: 1 866 442 2778

I finally gave up and called. They booked it over the phone. Evidently, the problem was specific to the 4000 mile awards.

They were very nice to me and even (without me mentioning it) didn't make me buy the 460 miles I needed to hit 16K ^

The website is still lolo tonight.

Trying to purchase a held itinerary, and when clicking "submit" get either a page of gibberish or the message "There is a problem with our booking engine."

Yes, yes there is.

HA sure doesn't need any more problems right now. Between the planes and the cancellations/delays, the web site, the phone line problems, and last but not least the competition. Yikes.

We're flying around quite a bit (gather cblaisd and kaukau are too) -- that should help.

Per tech support:

The only web browser that works with HA site properly is Internet Explorer

That's ridiculous. I'm sure HA will lose at least a few customers stemming from the problems that result over the headaches caused by HA's website.