I go to Houston a lot for business, so most of my frequent flyer miles are with United. Most of the time I wish I were on Delta instead, as virtually everything about their airline seems better. But I’ve got Stockholm Syndrome at this point. I want to see United catch up.
So Delta has had great wifi on their flights for approximately forever, but United is just now starting a “BETA” program. The connection once you’re on is pretty damn good, but getting on is fantastically horrible. Let’s make a list:
- They don’t save your settings. On Delta I sign in with an account that has my payment information, and I’m surfing within 2 minutes. But with United I have to go through an identification and payment entry process every single time. It’s like the 1990’s, but now.
- The payment fields are from high school mockups in the early 2000’s. They ask you for your card type, for example, in a pull-down. How long have we had the ability to identify a card type now? 5 years? Why would you implement a brand new system that does things in the extremely deprecated way. Someone please look at Stripe’s payment interfaces.
- I’ve done like 20 card entries on the system, and it’s worked 4 times. The error is repeatedly, “Unable to process request at this time. Sorry for the inconvenience.” Yeah, not as sorry as I am that Delta doesn’t go to Houston. Oh, and what’s super cool is every time it fails, I have to COMPLETELY re-enter all my information—including card number (which prints in cleartext on the screen, btw), CVV, AND the service level I want.
Every. Time.
I’d prefer they pass out the clunk-clunk card eating death machine, and then a Bic pen that I can scrape over the raised numbers on my card.
At least then there wouldn’t be any pretense of modernity.
