Booked flight

2004-07-08 Norway

Just booked my flight to go to Bergen, Norway at the end of the month. I already knew that I could get a good deal by using norwegian.no as my girlfriend has been using them the last couple of times that she has flown over, but I thought that I would check out the competition aswell to see what they are doing as I don’t particularly like the branding or even the “open” in a new window aspect of http://www.norwegian.no.

I checked on http://www.cheapflights.co.uk not just because of the name being easy to remember, but I knew that they offered a proxy to many airlines and online flight booking services, but in doing so I was quite amazed at the amount of choice I had in flights and in even booking the same flight.. Investigating futher; the sites came down in to 2 groups – the good ones, and the bad ones. Period.

Bad first, they seemed to have some of the most appalling user interface design I have seen for a recent e-commerce site, with even the basics of booking a flight being hard, and hampered by poor interface design and decisions. I am not surprised that the main sites get alot of traffic. Good ones, well they could still do with some improvements but the best do make the actually experience alot easier, with find airport codes well, the calender being intuitive and presenting the information clearly. Of these, http://www.scandinavian.net/ (also known as SAS; has good branding and the most helpful telephone sales support I have yet experienced), and http://www.opodo.com stand out as being a good experience creating a clear easy way to search and book.

In the end I went with norwegian.no simply because it was the easiest at a good price (and you can’t always argue against that!), but I do wish they could change there name or at least that of their website – what does the norwegian.no or scandinavian.net names have to do with an airline?