Ordered three tickets back to the US (one for me, one for my mother and one for my nephew). Spent a good few hours at it; servers fell over, flight availability changed from minute to minute, and I was bloody-minded enough to persist until I’d got exactly what I wanted. It’d been much quicker using the phone, but I don’t think I would have ended with precisely my choice. I’m more comfortable being assertive with Web interfaces than bullying call center slaves.
All the same, I still made some big errors on each order – nothing fatal, but I had to follow up each with e-mails begging the support staff to correct the mistake. This isn’t unusual; in the past I’ve even had to pay out to reschedule flights that I’d misbooked. In most cases, it’s been a sucky UI that led me into the trap. (This time, it was a default “Mr” entry for a name on Travel Select, and a really confusing Expedia oversight. If you need a separate billing and delivery address on Expedia, it makes you abandon your current order, and fill in a brand new form – without changing the “I’d like a separate billing and delivery address” option. You dutifully enter a new address, which Expedia blithely ignores by default. Separate billing and delivery addresses are a UI nightmare, I remember Jared Spool saying.)
I’d kill for a desktop-based flight availibiity bot. Autonomy never understood – the only time you need a bot on your own machine is when no-one else has a vested interest in performing that service for you.