It is just staggering to me how many airline execs I talk to will talk all the good talk on customer experience online but don’t seem to have ever intensively used their own sites.

If any Exec at Emirates or Qatar would like to chat, give me a call and I’ll step you through the break-points.

Here are a few highlights from my over two hours trying to book flights on online with both these airlines:

1. No flagging of where flights are unavailable in classes – results in endless loops looking for flights
2. Broken forms for payment with no elegant failure – couldn’t actually book online with Emirates
3. Forms that aren’t persistent – constant refilling where 2) happens
4. Live chat that doesn’t work and constantly adds more wait time
5. No synchronization of web screen with call center
6. Time to failed booking across both sites >50 minutes. Then 25 minutes booking via call center.
7. No price book or reference sync between the online and call center quote. Customers are not interested in the call centre is different to online nonsense. Especially when it is on your site and your call center. This is the post digital era and we are done with the demarcation lines. And when your site simply does not work, its rich to try and charge for a call centre booking.

These sites were built for another error and typical of most bloated, poorly designed Airline sites. Some tips:

1. Information must relate to the intent for which it was requested. Surfacing mindless results unrelated to the intent generate frustration and abandonment. Help the customer on their journey, not your journey.
2. Fail in real-time, inline and suggest the correction. Mindless reloading of forms and data should not be an event on any modern site. One of these sites had two credit card submission zones on top of each other – each requesting entirely different information in the address bar – which didn’t seem to work at all.
3. Indications should always be true. If you say 32 seconds to chat. Don’t reload it at the end of 30 seconds to be 95 seconds. What….?
4. Lead with identity. Capture what you need to complete as soon and as fast as you can and avoid cart failure at the end of the customer journey.

There is so much more. I ran a quick audit of the purchase experience across these sites and identified around 30+ common fails.

Staggering.