joshua362

Simply trying to pay the $5.60 on a points booking with a credit card, several in fact. Had this problem last time reserving a points fare. Is it me?

Not enough funds to purchase a ticket. Make sure the total amount of form of payments matches total ticketing price (SW101201-fAMb1SliSWiOQh65B6i4tQ)

joshua362

Utterly ridiculous. Retried after a few hours. Got the outbound leg reserved ok, now same issue with the return... Are they purposely trying to drive customers away?

dlaue

Be sure that your log-in session has not expired. In the middle of a booking, an expired login will give you all kinds of random errors.

Check the expiration date on the stored credit card info. This, too, will throw up a random error.

Other than that....well....it's Southwest's computer system. Take heart that it is actually lightyears better than it was a few years ago.

joshua362

Thanks for the tips although wasn't the case here. Waiting another 2 hours and it went though. Doubly annoying since the flight is for my daughter which meant entering her info over and over again!

flyventure

When you stop to realize that a significant majority of all WN pax book their reservations through the website, that should make you stop to evaluate that it could be something on your end. Granted I'm the last to defend the WN Tech team considering the issues we had internally, but anytime I had a person having a website issue - as soon as they closed all their browser sessions and went back in, it magically worked. The probably isn't always on WN's side.

rsteinmetz70112

Having worked with the Southwest site since the beginning of the year, the only possible conclusion is that the site is managed by chimpanzees who have no clear idea of what it is supposed to do or proper programing practice.

A reasonable person would expect that every login screen would behave the same and that every view of my future flights would offer the same options. Apparently this simple idea escapes Southwest web programmers.

Then there are the idiotic "OOPS" messages that tell you a mistake was made but don't offer the required correction, like the expired session message which fails to offer a chance to login again.

Yes logging out of your browser will reset the maze and if you follow the path Southwest expects, you will get where they think you should go.

smmrfld

Yes, but you must realize that josh and rseinfeld love the continual bashing and have elevated it to a fine art through their twin postings. You can always count on one chimpanzee (to use rseinfeld's term) following closely after the other.

InkUnderNails

Someone grab me a banana while I temporarily join this list.

My son wanted a project suggestion while in college as he was working on his Computer Science degree. He is now a software engineer.

I suggested an app that involved the WN web site. He came back in a week or so, reported the feasibility of the process and that his teacher had given him a good grade for the research. He and his teacher decided to drop actually developing the app as the site was such a complete mess from a programming standpoint that the app would be unreliable. The errors were random and unpredictable, exactly the type of problems we describe here.

No, it is not just us. Now, with everyone's permission, I will return to cheerleader status.

Epilog: When he graduated, he got a job that involved fixing a horribly built software project a piece at a time. It is not just WN.

joshua362

Now that is funny! Serve me up a banana too. I also didn't know I had a twin partner in crime!

And I think you got me all wrong. If you perceive that I bash an airline that I've flown 95% exclusively 20x + per year since 1999, then I bash out of love for a great airline that has (hopefully temporarily) lost its way by trying to join the ranks of the others. Maybe I'm uncomfortable with the lousy changes of late and live in the past.

I am not a IT newbie, closing my browser, logging in & out is the first thing I tried. I too got and object to the idiotic "OOPS" messages. How about taking an hour of programming time and actually make the error messages match the cause of the problem?

Last night, the passage of time is the only thing that worked, without restarting the browser BTW. Even if its "on my end", does it have to be this difficult to troubleshoot? "Not enough funds available" when using a (verified as working) credit card for $6? Come on.

Maybe WN should program a error message telling me to reboot my computer when I forget to fill out my preferred method of contact..

lougord99

There is absolutely no reason that an IT newbie shouldn't be able to book a ticket on the WN website.

You don't blame your customers for the problems they are experiencing with your company. You fix the problems.

antinseattle

It's FT!!!! If there was no bashing and complaining, there would be 85 percent less posts!

If it was "Always" nothing would ever get booked online. It's not even often. It's "rare".


It happens. It sucks. I'd call versus waste 2 hours online..... I usually waste 15 minutes online. Then I call. Complain to a WN CS. They care as much as I do on this

joshua362

Tru dat. I was in a mellow mood and didn't want to waste 20 more minutes on call. So I just checked in a few hours later. As long as the the price didn't increase (it was very close to the AT price anyway), I was OK.

But annoying. If something is "wrong", tell me how I can fix !!!!! They've pushed all of the "work" onto us in lieu of compensated Agents and costly telephone contact, you would think they would return the favor!

rsteinmetz70112

I must be hitting nerve. I am offering my honest comments. I have no real desire to move to another airline, but Southwest makes it hard. The website is a mess.

I am pleased that a few regulars have acknowledged the validity of my observations. I am a semi-professional in the IT business and welcome an informed opinion ^

I'm also not a Seinfeld fan

Unfortunately I have no plans to go anywhere and will continue to book 150 or so flights a year on Southwest, unless I have a viable alternative which at this point I don't.

I wonder if there is astro-turfing going on around here.

joshua362

Of course you are right. But its happened the last 2 times I've done a points booking. And countless OOOPS messages over the years. Somewhere between "rare" and "often"...

flyventure

Trust me, the Oops messages as generic as they are annoyed the living snot out of me (and most of us) every day. I've been designing websites for 20+ years now and I am also a software developer on the side. I can't stand vague non-informative errors. I have a feeling really fixing things as much as possible is a low priority right now (unless it impacts a large number of folks) until Altea is handling domestic operations. You should see the pages of open tickets there are for the SAAS res system, but it would only annoy you even more.