Follow-up: The misadventures of a prospective traveler

Recently, I had great problems booking an airplane ticket to Sweden, ultimately resorting to using a travel agency, which required both an unnecessary fee and a trip on foot.

For my return to Germany, my seasoned-traveler father booked the ticket from his computer.* While this worked in one go, the service that he ended up using (“supersavertravel”) was abysmal: The entire interface seemed geared at one thing and thing only—to coerce the user into buying expensive additional services that he did not need. This to the point that it was necessary to explicitly decline these many services and to do so individually—no, I do not want a hotel; no, I do not want extra insurance; no I do not want a rental car; no, …; no, …; no, …; no, …; no, …; no, …; no, …; no, …; no, …; … I even seem to recall (but could be wrong) that there was an additional query after submit along the lines of “You have not chosen this-or-that. Are you really sure that this is deliberate?”… Utterly inexcusable was the checkbox to decline spam: Where more main-stream businesses use a checked checkbox to imply “I consent to be spammed”, here the user needed to check the checkbox to decline spam…** The confirmation email, unsurprisingly, contained much more advertising and attempts to bring unneeded services to my attention than it did confirmation…***

*I had left my own computer in Germany in order to travel lightly; and only bought a one-way ticket to Sweden, because I did not know how long I needed to stay.

**Implying that the main idea almost certainly was to trick users into making the wrong choice.

***This in stark contrast to EuroWings below, where the confirmation email was informative, to the point, and did not even abuse HTML for the email text. (Portions of [1] contain some discussion of why HTML has no place in emails.)

A second trip turned out to be needed.* I tried EuroWings again, and this time everything actually worked.** However:

*My mother’s old house is being sold, and the time needed to sort through my own old books and whatnot turned out to be much longer than I originally thought.

**Contrast this with the original text. This time, I made sure to pay by credit card (3D-secure was not needed) instead of invoice. I do not know whether the old issue was a temporary server-side problem, a problem with a workflow somewhere, or whether there is some problem relating to invoices that I now ducked. (Regarding workflow: In my experience, most QA checks tend to run through fairly straight-forward scenarios, meaning that a scenario that involves the user e.g. going back to a previous step, responding to a validation error, actually reading the T-&-C’s, whatnot, is often left untested. These scenarios, however, are disproportionately likely to cause errors—especially when Ajax and other “state sensitive” technologies are used.)

1. EuroWings too tried to advertise additional services, if far fewer, in a manner that detracted considerably from usability and prolonged the process unnecessarily. Unlike with “supersavertravel”, they were all opt-in, but it would be so much better if they were all collectively moved to a separate and skippable step, especially since they will only ever be interesting for a small minority of the customers. (Be it because they have no need, already have made other arrangements, would lose points with some program by booking/buying somewhere else, …)

   Hotels are a potentially odd area. In the specific context of a flight, admittedly, I can see many cases where it would be helpful to “co-book” a hotel. However, hotels are offered more-or-less everywhere, including for e.g. train-travel. In most of these cases, booking a hotel together with the means of travel turns the reasonable workflow on its head: It is usually the hotel, not the means of travel, that is the bottle-neck, and a reasonable workflow would then involve finding and booking a hotel first and finding means of travel second.

2. Integrating a please-do-not-spam-me checkbox in the main pages would be trivial. Nevertheless, declining spam is only possible through visiting a separate page. On this page, moreover, the email address has to be added redundantly and manually, and it could be (depending on internals and the exact steps used by the customer) that the spam rejection only takes effect after the fact, e.g. in that the one click somewhere activates an unethical implicit consent to spam, while the other page only revokes this consent. This would leave a window of abuse open.

   Frankly, this is so common that legal measures are necessary: It must by law be forbidden both to use implicit consents and to require explicit rejections for any use of personal data (in general, but the more so for email data) that is not central to the process for which the data was provided. This, notably, from the customers perspective—not the data collector’s. (For instance, the data collector might see sending a news letter with advertising as a central part and having to send a confirmation email as an annoying negative, but for the customer it is the other way around.)

3. There are potentially redundant entries for email, including one for the actual transaction and one for please-notify-me-in-case-of-delays. It would be better to keep them as one per default (if in doubt by automatically filling the one with the other and allowing a manual change). Further, the entries are likely made in the wrong order for most users, with a non-mandatory entry of please-notify-me-in-case-of-delays on one page and the mandatory actual transaction address on a later page. Further, the former came with a pop-up upon submit that urged me to fill in this non-mandatory field anyway—which seems more like fishing for email addresses than an attempt to provide a service.

   Why had I left the email address out? Well, I knew from my earlier attempts* that if I did provide an email address for notifications, then I would also be forced to provide a cell-phone** number—absolutely idiotic.

   *The attempts in general are described in the original text, but details like the above were left out.

   **Note that I currently do not even have a cell-phone. Also note that cell-phones too can be abused for spam (through SMS).