An Ode To .Bomb

An Ode to .Bomb

Never was there an error;
So adept at striking terror;
In a ruse planned to frustrate;
The anger would never abate;

Gaze upon the routing rules so loose;
But your booking is caught in the noose;
Intricate fare designs abound;
But be wary: .bomb is around.

While there are pros and cons to both sites, I don't know of a single reasonable person who is unhappy to have the sCO web front end serve as the new united.com. Chuck Norris, when questioned, offered his thoughts:



Best of luck to the UA folks working the PSS integration this weekend.

So long, .bomb. We probably won't miss you.

 

Truth told, I cannot think of a single scenario where united.com was a better Web front end than continental.com.

That being said, I loved some of the things that united.com showed me after they were produced by back-end servers -- just to pick two examples, (1) instant ticketing and (2) fast, reliable, accurate frequent-flyer mileage accrual immediately after a flight segment. Farewell, united.com infrastructure. I'll miss everything but your face.

 

I certainly won't miss .bomb's tendency to change my destination to match my origin when executing a search, or the random error messages that my connection times wouldn't work before it even searched for a flight to see if there were valid choices. Those were the two most common errors it tossed at me over the years, and the source of much frustration when trying to exploit PMUA's routing rules.

 

Bye bye Dot Bomb.

 

Am I the only one who though it was ironic that Mackie's link doesn't work?

 

I don't know why I'm feeling weirdly sentimental about .bomb. I liked it a lot, never had particular reason to complain.

Then again, I remember dialing up to telenet and tymenet portals with a 300-baud modem so I could use EaasySabre through Compuserve. Those were the days.

 

It did a minute ago, sigh. Time to fix that.

And done.

 

I remember EaasySabre. I used to play with it while I was a broke college student, dreaming of all the tickets I'd book if I had the funds.

As for .bomb, it was OK if you didn't want anything too complicated and were willing to deal with calling to change tickets or book most awards. It did get better over the years, but still lacked a lot of functionality. And, despite their efforts to fix some of its odd errors, they never completely disappeared.

 

I still have a copy of EaasySabre somewhere, on 3-1/2" floppies!

 

Instant ticketing is huge in my book. If you do a high volume of tickets, the reconciliation effort is massive if there's no instant ticketing.

I'll miss you united.com!

 

What's a floppy?

 

Yup, definitely won't miss the city name autocomplete nonsense.

Still a little bummed that the continental.com search engine doesn't exactly work on my phone. It always uses an input date of 2 weeks from now, no matter what I type into the date field. You can change it by choosing "flexible date options" and then paging through 3 days forward or backward at a time, but that's your only option. (You'd think ASP.net Web forms would play nicely with WP7...)

 

I've been fortunate in that I haven't needed anything particularly complicated the last few years, but I'm about to.

The worst thing I've had to do in the last few was call to get a PNR split so that my husband could change his outbound flight, but that's not the kind of thing you can generally do online anyway.

 

When I switched my flying from UA to CO 5 years ago, I had never been on CO.com. I was so impressed by how much better it was than .bomb. Now getting partner miles to post is a different story, but the booking interface is really very good.

 

And not a function of the website front-ending the PSS system.

Yes, you can.

 

Technically, yes, but it is functionality we'll lose when united.com moves to continental.com renamed to united.com.

 

From a customer standpoint, what's the big deal between instant ticketing and the way sCOs system did it? Besides the very minor annoyance of receiving an email saying "hey, we got your request" and then another 20 minutes later confirming -- in the hundreds of tickets I've purchased on co.com I've never had an issue and that's all that matters in my book.

It's a very small and trivial thing that I'm absolutely fine living with to get rid of what was functionally, one of the worst travel related websites out there (second only to hilton.com in my book).

 

Because when it doesn't ticket, it's just that--no ticket. No notice. No email. No nothing. It just disappears and if you don't check back you never know. At least that's what has happened to me twice in the past few months on co.com. Maybe it is just me.

 

Not doubting your experience, but never had it happen to me.

The question is whether you would have experienced the same thing on ua.com (if your itinerary wasn't valid or something). I guess the key difference is you would simply know faster that there was an issue. Although having dealt with ua.com web-support on multiple occasions, the hour difference would be rapidly diminished on the back-end trying to solve the issue.

In my experience co.com of course wasn't flawless and there are things I would love if they are improved, but my fail rate on co.co is far below 1%, where it was probably 5% on ua.com. 5% fail rate is unacceptable to me. Sub 1 is fine (to me).

 

I think you've been lucky. I've had way too many anomalies.

If it were uniformly about 20 minutes, I'd be fine with it. The problem is it's anywhere from 2 minutes to several hours, to your ticket getting stalled and the airline having no business process to catch unticketed itineraries. Then if you don't catch it, it drops off eventually, and CO's position has historically been, "Well you didn't have a ticket, so it wasn't guaranteed," and you have to rebuy at market fares once you catch it.

Just this year alone (2012), I've had a couple take in excess of three (3) hours; had multiple tickets purchased within minutes of each other where just one (1) wouldn't ticket; and one that never did after 6-7 hours.

I've literally spent hours on the phone trying to remedy these, or cancel stalled reservations and redo them so they'd ticket to get them out of whatever stalled status they were in. What's worse is that the phone agents have no visibility into the queue and can't do anything about it other than to tell you it's fine. The email says it takes up to 3 hours, but then when you call after 3 hours, there's nothing they can do?

Less critical, but I've even booked some when receipt generation was down (i.e., it would ticket, but no confirmation email or receipt, and then requesting receipt would fail until receipt generation was back up -- though the site has no warning, you just have to figure it out). Fortunately those had a UA segment on there, so I could load the UA record at united.com and get the CO ticket until receipt generation was restored (at which time receipts never arrived until they were re-requested at co.com).

When you're buying several tickets, sometimes out of tight inventory, it's nice to have some sort of finality to the purchase. The ticket number is that finality.

 

Is there a consistent issue creating the error (e.g. a segment with a quasi partner like 9k or VS -- when that relationship existed)? Or was it seemingly completely random (which things never are when it comes to automated processes)?

Yeah, I've experienced that maybe a dozen times over the years. But the reservation populates under your OP profile so, for me, it wasn't a big deal until it came time to do an expense report, and then I just have to go in and print out the new receipt. But yes, I could see how that would be a hassle if someone didn't have a FF# or was using a US/UA number without a segment on that carrier.

The vast majority of my tickets are booked within 5 days of taking the trip. I wouldn't say I've been lucky, as if it were a consistent and persistent problem there's an assumption it would be remedied -- I'll just float the notion that you have been unlucky.

 

Completely random. Sometimes it involves partners, sometimes it's 100% CO metal.

But the randomness is what's the most frustrating. Like when I bought multiple tickets at the same time, and just one didn't ticket. The card was good, flights the same, lots of inventory, I didn't get it. No agent could explain it or force it. After a few hours, I gave up told the agent to ticket it now or cancel it. Agent couldn't force the ticket, so they cancelled it. I rebooked it and it ticketed in ~10 minutes just like the others did originally.

There's no rhyme or reason to this stuff.

 

Not to arm-chair quarterback what happened, but if you were buying multiple flights with similar data sets I wonder if co.com had a safety valve in there to protect what it thinks might be unintentional duplicate ticket purchases. The system obviously didn't work, but being someone who doesn't accept the random nature of things, I'm curious if this helps explain the computer's logic.

Meh. What do I know. I like solving problems more than complaining about them ad nauseum.

 

I like free beer ..... Oh sorry, wrong thread.

 

Multiple tickets, multiple accounts, multiple browsers.

I agree with you, I don't like the random nature of things. I'm in IT myself, and most everything is explainable. I just don't have the inside access to explain what goes on with CO's ticketing quirks, hence the mystery, much like some of CO's other systems.

Like I said, if it were consistently about 20 minutes, or even 2-20 minutes, that'd be understandable.