New Airline Web Sites: Boon or Bust?

by Jim Crandall (jcrandall@vcnet.com)

Most of us have been, and will continue to be, consumers of air travel. When we plan a flight, whether for business or pleasure, we need reliable, detailed information about routes, schedules, and fares. How and where we get this information depends largely on our destinations, our budgets, and the planning resources available to us. A busy CEO, for example, simply buzzes her secretary and says, "George, get me on an afternoon flight to New York. Car, hotel, dinner reservations as usual, okay?" A hardworking salesman on a limited expense account uses a consolidator—an agent who buys "cheap seats" in a block and sells them at remarkable discounts. A retired couple searches for interesting tour packages in the Sunday paper's travel supplement and phones their friendly travel agent. Sooner or later, all of these people will accomplish these tasks quickly and painlessly for themselves on the World Wide Web.

To see how close we are to this travelers' nirvana, I took a critical look at three relatively new airline home pages to see what miracles their marketing gurus and Web wizards have wrought. Having used only easySABRE, the aging airline reservation service available on America Online and CompuServe, I anticipated attractive pages that would be fast, full of useful information and simple to use—features yet to be achieved by not-so-easy easySABRE with its text-based interface and cryptic codes.

Delta Airlines seemed like a good place to start, and since it's one of the two carriers I use most frequently, I had great expectations. Disappointingly, the page loaded slowly and displayed an over-designed graphic depicting a skyline of world monuments on a bay in which floated colorful, geometric buoys masquerading as hypergraphics (pictorial links) to the main menu. Fortunately, below this cluttered graphic scene, there was an alternate menu in hypertext (word links) to serve visitors using slower or graphic-deprived browsers. Seeing that "Flight Plan" included the information I was looking for—schedules, flight information, airport and airplane descriptions and destination maps—I started to explore that area in detail. The "Flight Schedule" feature loaded fairly quickly—a simple form providing pull-down menus to select city destinations and departure dates. Text boxes for airport codes were also available for experienced searchers, so I keyed in "LAX" (Los Angeles) to "ORY" (Paris) and the process began. Within a few seconds, I viewed a spread of concise information on airports, times, connections and layovers (if any) at various hubs, as well as types of aircraft and flight numbers. Many of these headings were helpfully linked to more detailed information such as airport diagrams and the availability of ground transportation, including car rentals. There were even hyperlinks to recommended hotels, restaurants and entertainment ticket offices. In short, there was a wealth of useful information concisely presented and beautifully cross referenced. My only disappointment—and it was a big one—was that there was no online fare information or reservation service available. Hello, Delta—even old-fashioned easySABRE does that!

American Airlines is my other oft-used carrier, so I dialed up their Web address hoping to see some of the features that were missing from the previous page. I was treated to an attractive, faster-loading graphic depicting the AA logo, a cropped photo of an airplane and a compact array of navigation buttons which included the usual flight information, schedules, services and, something not available on the Delta page, "Fare Quotes." Also easily available was a link to my AAdvantage frequent flyer account which, upon closer inspection confirmed 40,000+ miles just waiting to be claimed. Scrolling down the page, I was pleased to find a complete list of hypertext links to all airline services with brief descriptions of their content, making navigation around this site a pleasure. On the negative side, the results of a trial search for an L.A. to Paris flight appeared with misaligned columns that made reading the form difficult at best. But to be fair, this quirk could easily have been the fault of my out-of-date version of Netscape.

Responding to recent media hype by United Airlines, which advertised a new, state- of-the-art online service, I decided to see what the folks from the "friendly skies" had to offer. Filling in faster than either of the previous home pages, a clever graphic depicting a "solar system" of menu buttons designating typical airline services (the planets), and a general index (the sun), unfolded rather quickly in spite of the ambitious art work. Sadly, the flight and scheduling data were less detailed, delivered more slowly, and were harder to navigate than either the Delta's or American's. On the good side, airport and airplane information—seating charts, airport maps, flight status and the like, was thorough, as were the many links to dining, hotels, and attractions at each United destination. I was also mollified by a button (the fourth "planet" from the "sun" as I recall) which indicated the presence of a "Reservations" page, a feature that the two previous sites had lacked. Upon selection, however, one is referred to the new "service" called "United Connection" which requires add-on software ($24.95) to "reserve and purchase travel with over 500 airlines, 50 rental car companies and 30,000 hotels worldwide. Now that's more like it! But why, in the great tradition of the Internet, isn't it free?

The answer becomes obvious when one discovers who owns the commercial reservation services used by AOL, CompuServe, and most of the world's travel agencies. easySABRE, the oldest and largest system in the U.S., is owned by AMR Corp., the parent company of American Airlines; UAL Corp. (United Airlines) heads a group that owns the popular, Galileo and Apollo reservation services; Delta is one of three airlines associated with Worldspan. The bottom line is that these and other reservation systems provide millions of dollars in revenue for their parent companies, occasionally, even more than the airlines themselves. So why should we even expect airline Web sites to provide free reservation and ticketing services?

Surprisingly, easySABRE is now in the process of redesigning its dated online system and will be selling tickets via the Internet later this year. So reports Stanley Ziemba in the Chicago Tribune (4/8/96). Ziemba goes on to say that "Apollo, the second largest system in the U.S. and, coupled with Galileo, the largest in the world, is also planning to establish a Web site [and that] other computer reservations systems have similar plans." It would seem that events are in motion that will eventually enable individual travelers to access all the information and services that are currently the exclusive domain of professional agents. But first two things have to happen: reservation systems have to be made much easier for the average consumer to use, and the airline conglomerates must come up with foolproof methods of charging for the service.

I think we can conclude that while the new airline Web sites currently provide a wealth of free travel information, two of the most useful services—booking and paying—will be handled by our "friendly travel agents" for some time to come.

Author's note: Since the writing of this article, American Airlines has instituted a new URL, a new look and a new service. It has streamlined its homepage design, improved its method of browsing the site, and, more importantly, it has added features that should eventually be adopted by all other carriers: fare quotes, reservations and, with the proper set-up formalities, online purchase of tickets. The time for travel agents may be shorter than we thought.

James Crandall, B.A., M.A. in Fine Arts, UCLA, recently took an early retirement from Los Angeles Pierce College, where he chaired the Art/Architecture Department.