A better booking app - your 2 cents?
 

Really curious to know if people like the booking apps currently available or if you find them wanting.

I always find that I have to book on a computer because I'm usually doing something out of the ordinary/fancy.

Do you guys like them or find them lacking?

If I could add anything, I would:
- Make it so that I could search based on "R" availability
- Be able to search for economy outbound but business return

What functionality would you add? I am kind of curious to know if everyone else thinks they could/should be improved.

I know most users won't need these, but for the UA app anyway:
- I also would like to be able to specify different cabins for outbound/return
- Add expert mode
- Improve the speed of search overall

For quick searches, though, I use Google Flights. Pretty fast and can handle multi-city.

There are extensive previous threads on desires and issues in searching for R availability. This is not a feature "omitted" from current UA and third party apps. Rather, UA carefully censors this data in many ways, permitting only cumbersome access via expert mode in the desktop website. From UA's point of view, lack of ability to show R space is a feature, not a bug or omission.

You can kind of do that now. Do a search, select a flight and then select the cabin.

I wish the UA phone app would allow flight cancellations and changes at any time, and not just after check-in.

Sorry, maybe I wasn't clear. This was about what I would ADD... If I could. I was not debating United's intent.

I was trying to go more n the spirit of "if you could add or take away or in general make it better, what would you do?"

Make it find flights in general

CHS-CLT for July 30. Only lists CHS-IAD-CLT, even though in flights.google.com the IAD-IAH-CLT flight was cheaper.

Same thing if you try and search CHS-MIA and sometimes CHS-NAS

Gimme the results and let ME decide what I want

As has been pointed out, the inability to search for R space is a business decision, not a technological limitation.

And the app already permits you to choose different cabins on each leg of a round-trip or multi-destination flight. That's one of its best features. Are you perhaps using an outdated version? Economy and first class fares are literally listed alongside one another, so it's hard to miss.

Honestly, UA's app is a breath of fresh air compared to its competitors'.

The #1 improvement I'd like to see in the app is to get rid of the bloat. It takes up at least 3-4 times the amount of memory it needs to. I had to remove it long ago because I ran out of space on my phone, and the United app cannot be fully installed to the SD card.

Maybe I'm just getting old but I feel like I want a real keyboard and monitor in front of me when booking flights. A decision of at least $xxx is something that can wait for me to get to a desk, and usually involves some amount of research.

But doesn't allow for mixing classes on different legs, AFAIK, which UA does.

What I would like, and possibly falls into the business decision category, is to get flight availability like Google Flights gives me. It's somewhat ironic that the 3rd party gives me flights with UA codeshares that I can't get on UA website or app, and then gives me a link so that I can ticket with UA. Google isn't infallible though, they show LH fares that can be easily beaten by going to LH's website, sometime differing by 1000's for premium fares.

I was being polite - substitute "stupid" for "ironic".

It would also be fabulous to be able to specify routing in the original search, like you could in ITA, rather than hoping they'll offer you connections through XXX and having to pick through the results.

UA has the best app of the big 3 airlines by far. I hope they don't change anything as usually when changes happen they end up getting it wrong. See the new Marriott app as an example.

FWIW, I didn't meant to limit this discussion just to United....

The better question is, perhaps, if you were going to make a "Dream Booking App", what would it have that would make it different/better/improved that what's currently out there?

This is not intended to be a discussion about business decisions. It's a "wish list".

Is this all hypothetical brainstorming? Just askin'

Not necessarily.

But trying to get some insights from people at the moment.

So, back to the question, this is NOT about United or any other entity's business intent or business decisions.

It's about what your WISH list for a better (Great) booking app would be...

What would it look like?