Swiss website issues
 

Just wondering if the following has happened to others as well, or if yesterday was the day Ralph broke the Internet (or here the Swiss website).

The following happened yesterday while trying to book half a dozen transatlantic flights:

• Serial security challenges when trying to move through a booking ("you look like a bot"). I used a commercial VPN solution and this very rarely happens. This issue persisted even after I logged into the Swiss website with my M&M account. I am all for security, but that seemed to be a bit much.
• On multiple occasions, a booking threw up error messages including a 404 (have not seen one in a long time).
• While entering bio, address, and passport info (U.S.), two fields reset frequently including the phone country code field (from U.S. to Germany).
• Rather perplexing, when returning today to fill in APIS information all the birthdays that were entered at booking were incorrect by a count of "1 day" each. That really should not happen.
• Using Edge resulted in much fewer issues than Chrome (just as an observation).
• Pricing was a bit wonky. Example: Pulled pricing from ITA Matrix, check Swiss website, see the same price, update number of passengers, price jumps 45%, stop booking, go back to home page and start over, the original price pops up (15 seconds later), execute booking. This happened three times for summer 2020 flights which means this is not an inventory but a processing issue.

Maybe a little less focus on up-sells and a bit more focus on website and system stability would not be a bad idea...

What happens when you don't use the VPN to access the site?

The security alerts went away without VPN. But most of the other issues - including the weird changes to birthdays - happened when not using the VPN. And some issues should be / are independent from the mode of access.

The VPN issue has been around for quite some time. I even have it at times when not using VPN, which is a complete pain! At least then, or when logged in (when they even know who it is, so not the competition’s bot; and don’t forget they are still trying to maximize pricing based on point of sale and/or your search pattern) they should get it right! LX IT’s response a few months back was that they were working on improving their detection tool. It does seem to have improved with me a bit, though. Incidentally, have experienced this with others as well, e.g., SQ, though nowhere as annoying as with LX.

I have also experienced the one day off in API, but that only seemed to be an IT bug.

As to availability when you increase pax, apart from dynamic availability, don’t forget it will take the highest fare applicable to one pax for everybody on the same booking (e.g.,, if you are booking 9 pax and there are only 8 seats available at a lower fare available in the cabin, but 9 at the higher, it will tske the higher fare for all 9), so at times you need to split the request/booking to avoid that.

This is a very good point that I think few consider, even when booking 2 or 3 tickets, it’s worth checking the single ticket cost initially

Thanks for the background. Very helpful. Next time I'll wait until I don't need a VPN connection.

Another strange issue is that when logging in with my M&M account (U.S. based), defaults reset in address and phone fields - but not for the U.S. but Germany. This has not happened when going through the booking process without logging in.

The comment on pricing/seats of course makes sense. But the issue was actually simple - enough seats (3) were available in the respective fare bucket and I was able to book these eventually after the website showed much higher pricing when resetting the number of passengers from 1 to 3. The solution was to log out, log in again, start with 3 passengers, and voila proper pricing appeared again.

In terms of dynamic pricing - I always run pricing first in ITA Matrix and pull the fare codes. This has allowed me to call certain airlines (e.g., United) and have an agent pull routing and code in short order and book a ticket. I have noticed a few attempts at dynamic pricing and if needed have booked via Expedia. The three airlines which in my experience do not always show all ("cheaper") fare buckets are LH, LX, and AC. In some instances LH however has shown cheaper fares that I was able to see otherwise.