Name and Shame #1: OpenSkies (multiple offender)

As a very satisfied and long standing customer of British Airways, I decided to see if there were any benefits attached with flying their subsidiary OpenSkies, which flies from continental Europe to the US. However, the online experience proved so underwhelming that I couldn't be bothered to try and find the flights from Paris Orly to New York that I was interested in.

It all started out pretty badly when I typed in flyopenskies.com into Firefox (no "www.") and got the image below... It turns out that the security certificate is only valid for the site if the "www." is included(!) Not exactly rocket science to make sure that all subdomains and versions are put on the same certificate. This will take a techie about 2 minutes to sort out, but obviously the people at OpenSkies all still type in "www." when they type a URL (i.e. a web address for the layman) into their browser. Bad, bad, bad! The least they could do in the future is to get at least some half experienced web site users to test the site before letting it go live.



Unfortunately it got even worse when I then typed in "www.flyopenskies.com" and selected France as my country (remember that I was looking for fares from Paris to New York City). On the homepage I see an offer of 1944 Euros in Biz (their business class). Not exactly a great price compared to what I can get ex London, but that wasn't really the issue. The point was that I accessed the site at 11:05 p.m. GMT on February 10th (i.e. 00:05 a.m. in France on February the 11th) - and it states clearly "Book this before February 9th"!

If you decide to build a site using a Content Management System (CMS) there should at least be an option for the non-technical people to update it with expiration dates for stories and offers so it wouldn't even show up. If they update it manually, obviously the pride in their jobs is sorely lacking - or the people responsible for updating are not very process oriented (or worse...)

This is really not good enough. And the worst thing is that these mistakes should be so easy to spot and avoid if you put into place a proper procedure for:

1. Defining functionality of your CMS
2. Testing your site

Unfortunately, the example of the expired offer is also something which is incredibly prevalent on the BA.com web site when you log into your Executive Club (BA's loyalty programme) account and wish to see the offers. I would recommend a thorough review of the processes by which BA's web sites are built and maintained - from both a technical and a marketing/customer service point of view as it's very clear that there is room for improvement.