Archaic United Wi-fi

May 16, 2014

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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

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