Lots of suggestions from serious regular flyers. Here is one from an infrequent holiday only flyer.
A good "Where do we fly map". Continentals is very good. Deltas is dreadfull.

Ability to see all fare buckets, multiple connections through any city, not just hubs, plus ability to change seats at any time.

Simple what *not* to do
 

I would like to provide an apposite advice. Visit the Delta, BA, AA, and United sites. Create an account, log in, try to do stuff. Those sites stink, but each in its own way.

Then create user scenarios around all the things people are talking about and see if you can find some commonality. Especially when you try executing on the competitive sites.

For instance, much talk of route maps. I would love to be able to work in a pure map view when I do a multi-hop multi-carrier trip. Can't make Paris work, well, then I can see that Orly isn't that far off... Others want route maps to show or hide partners. So steal the map control button concept from Yahoo.

Thanks for asking!

I like pop-up calendars, when done correctly.

I would suggest what the old AmEx site supported for many of these features - an expert mode that you can persist with your profile or through a cookie. Most of the world won't want to see availability by fare bucket and it would cause so much confusion and increase in customer service calls it would never get in as a standard feature. But have it there for expert users.

Use Ajax technology liberally. Orbitz is a good example. They have the best popup calendar. The site should work equally well on all OS and common browsers - there's no excuse for a website to fully work only on IE these days.

If your airline is a member of an alliance or does a lot of code sharing, let me decide whether to filter out such partners. I may want only a flight on United metal - so don't return screenfulls of US Airways or Lufthansa codeshare flights unless I say it is okay.

As said above, aircraft type, live seat maps, on time performance, and ability to cherrypick fare buckets are very important.

Thanks for the opportunity, and good luck!

Have warnings like ITA for long layovers and prop plane segments.

I'd say this is more of a TravelBuzz subject so may be worth asking a Moderator to move it there.

It's obvious that many people have pet peeves - many of the responses are from people with only 1 or 2 posts so does that mean they signed up just to vent about their least favourite websites? :) :) Welcome to FlyerTalk all of the above who are new.

To repeat some of the earlier ones:

• If you're going to auto-fill the return date, make it so that it is after the departure date, not based on today's date with an error message when I search!
• Remember my information (dates, destinations, etc.) when I want to search again
• Support the back button
• Don't use pop-ups/unders
• Do make sure the same information is available in all languages - probably an oversight when they were updating but Finnair recently had info on their Finnish site that was missing from the English site
• Do come back here and tell us which site you developed when it goes live :)

My other pet peeves:

• Don't use session-based URLs. Finnair is the worst case of this - the only way I can bookmark it is to start at www.finnair.com, click from there to the International site, enter my login, etc. [aside: if anyone knows how to get a bookmark into that site, I'd be grateful to hear how!]
• Don't have a mini-site for my frequent flyer account (Finnair and to some extent Thai). Integrate it into the main website so that I can get all the information I need there
• If I've logged in, remember that if I browse around another part of your website (Thai)
• If you're going to give me an upgrade certificate to reward me for my business, let me use that through your website for flights I've booked with you, don't make me email or call
• If I've logged in, don't have a ridiculously short time limit before you force me to log in again (Finnair again). If my login has timed out, try to remember where I was instead of dumping me back at the start of your site
• Make it easy for me to see if my miles have posted. When I've logged in, it should be 1 click to see my mileage balance with recent flights. I don't want to have to go into the mini-site (Finnair) or jump through a hoop of telling you which time period I want to look at (Thai) which you'll ignore anyway
• Make sure the Frequent Flyer part of the site is on the same server as the main site so it has the same availability. Thai bugs me when I can get to the Thai main site but I can't log in because the Royal Orchid Plus part is down
• Give me the option to store my login details so I don't have to remember them again. Put a cookie on my PC if needed, I'll let you if I trust you. This is particularly annoying for sites that I visit infrequently and then have to spend a while either trying to remember/find the username or password
• Keep my account secure. I've had a couple of occasions where I've logged into the Thai site and pulled up my mileage balance but been shown someone elses. It always clears when I log out and log in again but what other details could I see for that person :eek:
• Show me availability in different classes on a flight. Not just available yes/no but how many seats are available and what class they are in so I can see if I'm likely to get an upgrade on an oversold flight or if a waitlist is likely to clear. I know it probably won't get you extra revenue and may lose revenue for that flight if I can see a cheaper fare class but it will get my loyalty which is probably worth more in the long run
• Let me book an award flight online to the same destinations that I can book a paid flight. On the Finnair site, the list of destinations for paid bookings is longer than the list for award bookings so I have to call to book some award destinations but I can book my companions paid ticket online - annoying!

That's all I can think of for now (probably my longest FlyerTalk post ever). Thanks for giving me the chance to vent on a Friday afternoon and thanks for asking in advance. As you'll see, many of my pet peeves are with Finnair. When they last revamped their site, I got an email afterwards asking me what I thought of it. I filled in the survey, listed the faults I've listed here and still nothing changed :mad: I hope you have an opportunity to take these suggestions into account on your site

May sound minor, but let me select city codes, not just airports (i.e. WAS, NYC).

You listening DELTA? :mad:

1. Fare buckets similar to Southwest's website
2. automatically pulls up the "do you want to upgrade" when you purchase a ticket.
3. automatically pulls up seat assignemtns
4. ability to change seats after booking online
5. ability to find the nearest airport to a city served by that airline. I sometimes use
http://aviationtoolbox.org/old/nearby_airports
but that gives me all General Aviation airports that are not necessarily served by air carriers.
6. ability to sort the outputted matrix of flights by price, connection city, arrival time, departure time

I like the popup calendar idea - but don't like either the calendars or date pulldowns that show return flights before your outbound flight. I also like the ability to view all area airports at once (WAS, NCY, etc) and screens that show return flights from all airports - it's often more convenient (and sometimes cheaper) to fly into National and out of BWI, for example. I also want to see the full fare at first glance and not to go through several screens to find. CO used to do this, but dropped it a year or so ago. I also like the ability to look for alternative dates or airports. And, of course, the ability to go back to a previous screen without losing all the data.

First, welcome to FT, wright! :)


Here's my list:

- WAS, NYC, LON, etc. are extremely helpful, get them in. Don't make me choose JFK/LGA/EWR if I really just want to go to New York. (LH is guilty of this)

- Show me fareclasses right away. And show me how much more expensive other fare classes are. LAN.com has a nice little system for this in their online booking, it's a little dropdown menu on the bottom right of the interface. Do not pull an Aer Lingus and assume that the cheapest fare is always the fare I want.

- Pop-up calendars do more harm than good.

- For revenue tickets, include flights on airlines within your alliance. If you don't fly, say IAD-IST, but a member of your alliance can get me there, do the guys a favor and let me know. It shouldn't be dependent on codeshare flights only.

- Oh, and of course the route map issue. Well done and easily accessible, please.

Thanks everyone!!!!
 

This is Gryphondart . . we're still getting our project under way . . but I wanted say THANKYOU to all of you for the thoughts you've taken the time to write . . as we get deeper into it I may be back on more specific inquiries , i.e frequent flyer dashboards, flight listings presentation, etc.

I will be now taking all of these notes and parsing it all out to be sure to glean all of your collective expertise and desire.

FEEL FREE to keep the peeves coming . .I'll continue to check back.

Thanks again,

Gryphon

- Simplicity.
- Give me shortcuts.
- Reduce data-entry.
- Eliminate REPEAT data-entry.
- Minimal graphics. I don't need flash, animation, video or advertising.
- Quick page loads. (not like DL)
- Allow the site to remember my password and/or don't time me out. If I have a secure computer at home, I don't want to have to re-enter my password 5 times a day.
- Make it intuitive.
- I like the layout of choosing flights/fares on Southwest's website.
- I like the seat chooser on AA.
- Don't rearrange choices on a page from one visit to the next (AAdvantage Bonus Offers).
- Minimal colors (see simplicity).
- Make menus work the same on every page (see AA - on some pages the menu on the left has submenus, on other pages they don't).
- Let me easily switch between multiple FF accounts/passwords. (i.e. switch between my wife account's and mine w/out retyping a stupid long FF number that I can't remember). Allowing the use of the IE AutoComplete feature solves this. It works on SW and DL, not AA or CO.

I would love to be able to customize myAA for example. I do with Yahoo and others. I have about 6 things I do on the site and sometimes they are burried.

Optimally the web site would have some intellegence and learn what I do and provide those at the top.

List of nonstop and direct flights from one point of origin
 

I've always thought it would be useful to see a listing of all destinations reachable by either non-stop or direct (one or multi-stop) flights from my point of origin. Some people do not like to change planes, perhaps due to limited mobility or ???, and might be opportunistic enough to be willing to fly on vacation anywhere a non-stop or a direct (single aircraft) flight would take them.

e.g. I live in YYZ but often use Southwest from BUF. I prefer non-stop flights so when I go to FL I would be willing to fly to any of Southwest's FL destinations, PROVIDED the flight is non-stop.