Flight sites usability notes
Sarah and I are planning a trip to Italy for the middle of the year, and as a result, I’ve been searching various travel websites for plane tickets on a regular basis, trying to get the cheapest and most convenient flights I can find. Every site I’ve used works nearly the same way, but they all suffer from similar little usability problems that could easily be improved.
- Save my search details in a cookie.
I keep going back to these sites and having to re-input all the flight details: airport codes, dates, number of passengers, etc. It wouldn’t be hard at all for the site designers to store this data in a cookie for me and let me recall my most recent searches with just a click. And I shouldn’t have to register an account on the site to do this. - Let me specify broader time ranges.
Every site lets me choose an hour for my flights to depart. Some let me choose more vague time ranges like morning/noon/evening. But what I want to be able to specify is “10 a.m. or later,” and nobody lets me do this. Surely I’m not the only one who wants to specify a range like this. - Include nearby airports.
Several of the sites have methods to include “nearby” airports in their searches. However, one of them doesn’t define “nearby,” and one limits that to “airports within 80 miles.” Why don’t I get to tell you what airports I consider nearby? Let me specify the search radius, or, better yet, show me a list of airports that I can check off.
