Airline websites are rubbish!

I have just spent the last 30 minutes trying to obtain the cheapest flights between Joburg and Cape Town. Its really amazing the number of conventional (SAA, BA, Nationwide) and low cost (Mango, 1Time, Kulula) airline operators in South Africa, and based on my experience using all of them over the last few years, they all generally provide an excellent service relative to other airlines I have flown around the world. My favourite domestic airline is 1Time, mainly due to a combination of excellent service, price, comfortable cabins and punctuality.

I do have one major gripe with the South African domestic airlines though - their websites are pants! Like cellphones, where in nearly every case a phone is perfect except for a few niggly issues which each brand or model fails to perfect, the websites for each of the airlines mentioned above have their own particular glitches, some of which are very annoying. It will take me too long to mention all the frustrations encountered on each website but to provide some proof of my allegations I will give a few quick examples.

The biggest airline in South Africa which also happens to be our national carrier, SAA, can’t even configure their website for Firefox without allowing a few glitches to slip through, try it and see. It might take you a while too, considering their load time was by far the longest out of the 6 airlines.

Try Mango’s website, get all the way to the end and then, oops, you need to change a time or maybe a date, use your browser back button or the button provided on the actual page, and you get sent right back to the homepage, you’ll need to put all the information in again.

1Time has a similar problem but the coding on the website itself allows you to go backwards and forwards during the booking process, just don’t use that browser back button. They also don’t have a calendar function anywhere on their home page, so you have to manually input the dates and need a seperate calendar to confirm the actual day eg. Monday, Tuesday etc. You’d think calendar input should be standard on any travel website.

Nationwide has a pretty decent system which seems to work really quickly, until it comes to selecting the actual flights you want. They have chosen to do things differently to the other 5 airlines by scheduling the inbound and outboud flights together which makes it really difficult to select the exact inbound and outbound times you desire. I gave up and moved on, no time for that kind of bother.

Why does all this matter, surely if they are all pretty much the same, you will take a few minutes extra and go with the cheapest one?

Well thats the problem, they are all priced almost exactly the same, the low cost airlines are around R1300 - R1400 and the conventional airlines are roughly R1350 - R1450. So certainly not enough variance to differentiate them on price, nor is there really enough to differentiate them on service (in my opinion, and not taking into account after-sales service). So perhaps the most important sales weapon is…..wait for it….. the website  - which in the case of modern airlines now doubles as everything from a shop front window to an honest and helpful salesman!

Unfortunately although they’re all really different in appearance, the websites are all just as bad as each other. You’d think that in this supposedly “competitive” market a bit of money invested in a really efficient and user friendly website might give one airline a competive edge over another.

Or would it….? Well, as it turns out maybe not! Maybe most bookings are done over the phone, maybe the percentage of online bookings is really small in a country with limited internet connectivity, maybe the airlines don’t really care because the customers have no real alternatives, maybe the website ACTUALLY doesn’t matter!!

Like cellphone networks, the airlines aren’t really in competition, they have an oligopoly and there is some kind of weird Nash Equilibrium in place where nobody believes that achieving the perfect booking site will actually increase profits, especially seeing as the rest of the cartel group will just copy the perfect site and there will be no change in turnover! Now its easy to see why they are complacent and the customer, going forward, is just going to have to put up with rubbish websites!

OK, so having vented my frustrations, who am I going to go with? Well ultimately 2 things have become the dealbreaker, brand loyalty to 1Time or going with BA and getting the airmiles.  So I am flying BA down to Cape Town and 1Time on the way back!

Lastly, I often get asked who my favourite airline is, for the record the answer is very easy:

Best International Airline - Qantas (Australia)

Best Domestic Airline - 1Time (South Africa)