Here might be another bug that needs attention. Last night I booked a flight at home and printed the "purchase confirmation", faxing the actual paper confirmation from WN to my secretary at my office. Then my "poor" relative wife (poor because she has to depend on me for support) asked what time I was leaving. The printed purchase confirmation did not show any flight times (it had everything else). I won't see the actual confirmation faxed to my office until Monday so I can't comment on that. I know I could have emailed the confirmation and the departure and arrival times might have been there. But emails can be deleted and now I have hard copies at both locations.
I was of course able to go back into the system and get the flight times from the flight numbers, once again satisfying my poor wife.

While viewing a reservation recently I noticed that the revamped site has an Add to Calendar link on the View and Email Air Reservation page. So if you've been wishing for the calendar export feature and haven't already loaded all your pre-revamp reservations into your calendar, you can now do so with somewhat less effort. Just go to your future itineraries page [optional but enormously helpful: apply the compact/exportable future flight listing bookmarklet]; Ctrl-click all the links to view reservations in new tabs, then proceed one-by-one through the tabs saving the ics files. Warning: these files are somewhat bloated with advertising...but they do automatically add OLCI alarms for you.

I don't use Outlook but I wanted to experiment with the add to calendar feature. When I did so I noticed that when importing the ics files into Windows Calendar the UTC times did not translate to my local time zone. That is probably just reflective of my total ignorance of calendar software, but it got me wondering whether users of other calendar programs were able to import their itineraries correctly. Anybody tried it?

BTW, the Add to Calendar link opens a sub-window that says:I tried saving both types of calendar files and could not discern a difference between them.

I don't like having to type out the city names... I just tried my first booking with the new screen.

Since there are now blank fields, I assumed I could type "MCI" and "LGA" in the fields. I did so, manually typed in the dates (since the calendars were so slow), and then got an error message saying that those cities were not served. I realized I used to have to type city names in the old site, but it was a very fast dropdown and I could just type 1-2 letters and get to my selection.

After the error, I then (slowly) got a big pop-over box listing all of the WN cities and was able to click on them. Alternatively, I see I could have typed out "Kansas City" and it would have worked too...in my case, by the time I typed "Kansas".

I like the fare display screen...no problems there. Just a more sluggish site than what I was used to. I always liked the straightforward, fast simplicity of the old site.

I used the new interface on Thursday to try and book a flight. When I tried to use funds from previous itineraries, I received an error message that the confirmation numbers could not be found or the funds had expired. Of course, when I checked them using the View Ticketless Travel Funds, they were there as expected. I reverted to phoning an agent and going through a 20-minute ordeal to book a web-only fare that I anticipated doing on-line in two minutes. And now the itinerary does not show up when I log into my account because it was not made on-line.

Another frustruation is that the calendar pops up below the date fields and is often below the viewable portion of the page on the browser. When you go to scroll down so that you can see the calendar, it disappears and you have to click it again and wait for it to reappear. I don't seem to have this problem on other booking engines.

In my opinion, the new interface is not ready for primetime and Southwest should address the problems before continuing to roll it out.

I typed in city code and got the city name in the box. Hit tab key to get to next box (or maybe enter) and it filled it in for me. Not too bad.

OAKman - I think I posted news on this in another thread - but, the new site had an issue where it didn't recognize ticket exchanges if the ticket being exchanged wasn't originally for travel within a 3 day window of when you are booking (3 day window: yesterday, today, tomorrow).

I see that you were trying to book on Thursday, this issue was fixed on Friday.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Thanks for the update. I like the new site and I'm sure you will get it to hum like the old version as you fine-tune it--and as we get accustomed to it.

Finally got to try the new reservations page. While it is a bit slower (and I feel like I have to do more scrolling), as a whole I think it's a nice improvement.

A couple of observations/requests:

1. Add to Calendar after booking the flight

Love this feature... except I can't get it to work with Google Calendar. Is it possible to add this as a link?

2. Reservation details now displayed on the final buy page

I've been waiting on this one for ages! However, is it possible to have that right hand element scroll with the page (or repeat next to the final buy button).

Also, can you add the day of week to the calendar graphic?

Thanks.

I just made a reservation and by luck of the draw got the old interface. Found a couple minor idiosyncracies. Don't know if these oddities have always been there or are new, but here they are.

1) I cancelled a round-trip and rebooked it as two one-ways as I had simply forgot to do that the first time, and I like the convenience of having two one-ways. The cost was identical.

2) When booking the first leg and applying the TTF the "balance remaining" was rounded off to the nearest dollar, not the exact amount, although when I booked the second leg the pennies were still in the TTF and it worked out OK.

3) When entering the PNR identifying the ticketless travel fund to use, hitting 'Enter' after typing in PNR and name took me to the disability assistance page instead of continuing with my reservation. Had to click the "apply travel funds" instead. Annoying as I am manaical about using keyboard shortcuts everywhere possible to avoid using the mouse. Yes, a hangover from running waaay too many DOS programs in my earlier years.

With regard to the new interface, I'm another who does not like the huge display of city names popping up when I know darn well what I want to type in.

The new site seems slow because there are graphics and calendars to muddle through. I think speed is more important than other factors.

A couple of other observations in general and after reading the WIKI:
1. I cannot find a feature which tells you where your flight is coming from, eg to be used to track the currently planned inbound aircraft status. I know their can be equipment swapps but I would like to see the inbound aircraft currently planned for use. It would also be neat if the aircraft# were displayed. For a good example of such an implimentation see:
http://pda.continental.com

2. When you display an itinerary, you should have all available transaction options from with in the itinerary such as check in, change flight, cancel itinerary, cancel boarding pass, etc. I think for something like cancel boarding pass you have to still go under travel tools and then manually enter in the confirmation#. Perhaps you could put a combo box in with all of the itinerary related functions that one might do on a particular PNR;

3. In boarding passes there is no alt-text to show the boarding group and possibly the position number. The alt-text (I looked at the source) is just "";

4. There should be automation where a pax can sign up for flight alert messages, perhaps through their RR account. You should not have to manually set up a flight alert for each flight;

5. Under the RR account a pax should be able to track their available TTF. Probably people on Flyertalk for the most part keep track of their TTF but I think this would be especially helpful for the general public;

6. On the mobile site it does not appear that you can use TTF to buy a ticket. Perhaps you don't want it on the main screen but there should be a control to access that option. Also again if unused TTF's were tied to the RR account you could even perhaps have a checkbox to "use oldest TTF First," etc.

7. It would be good if you enabled functionality with SMS messages eg to check in, cancel your boarding pass, or book the next available flight. I find SMS is a lot quicker and de-cluttered and faster than having to even use moble web sites on my phone.

The theme here obviously is that I would prefer you spend your time on new actual features and functionality enhancements, and less time on the look of the page or the graphics/calendars which numerous reports indicate may slow performance. A lot of pages these days are written too heavy, to web 2.0 too GUI.

I for one miss the command line for booking trips I used to use Easy Sabre, as well as System One for the most part when I worked as a travel agent. If you really know your command line and can string commands together your a lot faster than GUI , and you don't have that overhead of graphics and nonfunctional clutter. OT, I don't know that its "good" that all these systems and jobs can now be done with so little training and knowledge. I feel like in the old days you had to really know the system and invest in learning it. But once you knew it, you really knew it.

Google doesn't index titles in thread replies so I repeat: New SeatFinder displays fares instead if not logged in.

Is this a policy change or a glitch?

ftnoob -

The only way to access SeatFinder is from your Account Snapshot, which would mean that you are already logged in. (You can actually also access it from the "Select Flight" screen in the path of booking an award, but again you have to be logged in to access that screen).

If you are coming in through a bookmark, favorite, etc. - then it will indeed show fares instead of available award seats.

It has always worked that way.

Website was not allowing payments this morning. It was giving most reservations the error of:

There is a problem with your form of payment. Please verify your payment information and try again. If you continue to receive this message, you may wish to try an alternate form of payment or you may contact a Southwest Airlines Customer Representative for assistance at 1-800-I-FLY-SWA (1-800-435-9792). (SW900001)"

Wait times on the phone were 25-30min

Another report of the new site not working. Tried to book a flight today that had "web only" fares, and to pay for it with monies from two different TTF funds, one with expiration soon (Dec.) and one with expiration not-so-soon (Apr.). The fare total was more than the value of the earlier-expiry fund, but less than the value of the later-expiry fund. I applied the smaller, earlier-expiry fund first and it looks ok. Then upon application of the later, later-expiry fund to take care of the remainder, the web site decides to ignore my first fund application and take the entire fare out of the larger, later-expiry fund.

A call to the 800 number on the back of my RR card got an answer within a couple of minutes, but it took going on hold twice and about 25 minutes total on the phone to get things straightened out. To SWA's credit, the agent got me my booking including the "web only" fare and used the funds correctly, but it shouldn't have required a call at all. I was promised email confirmation of the booking but it hasn't shown up. A manual lookup of the new PNR finds the flights, but of course I have no record in my "upcoming itineraries" list.

The explanation given for why I couldn't do it online was that one of the TTFs I was using had some tag on it different than the other in their database, so it required manual intervention to "set them both the same".

This started happening several months ago. I think Victor explained why they do it like this now, but I can't remember the thread.