Booked some flights yesterday with British European (was Jersey European) to fly from Dublin to Exeter.
It’s a good website, but a good website in the same was that a 5yr old BMW 5-Series is a good car. Everything is there and it works, but it just looks a little bit dated.
On one level it works very well (after all, I booked by flights and am now looking forward to my Trip). On the other hand, it could be that bit better. Some suggestions
- Use Ajax to make the user less aware that they are using a web site and more ‘just let me book my flights’
- Better date / price selection. If you want to move your flight forward / back a day it doesn’t show the price until after you’ve made the selection. I was working with the team on AerLingus.com when they came up with show a week before and after the date with prices.
- Get rid of the ‘do not push a button until we confirm your flights’ thing. Of course people are going to push the big red button. The use of Ajax (to do polling to see when the back-end system is finished) and Intelligent use of session numbers (it’s built using Struts) to avoid ‘double booking’.
Did I hear the works Struts and Ajax? As a complete co-incidence, here’s an article I wrote on how to implement all of this.
OK, now that I’ve got that off my chest, I can look forward to Cornwall.
Paul Browne 
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