Recently I was booking some flights and had to use British Airways and Lufthansa systems. Making a comparison between the two airlines is inevitable as they developed very different solutions.
The beginning is pretty similar on both sites, you will have to enter departure and destination airports and dates. Then you get to the flight selection.
British Airways
The BA site will display available flight dates and prices in two tables, one above the other. This approach is fine, but in my opinion the tables are two big and contain two little information, the comparison between them is a little bit difficult.
Really bad 1: when you choose another flight, a message with a funny animation will be displayed informing that the price will be updated, but after waiting a while nothing changes… What is this?!
Really bad 2: There is a link to a Currency Calculator. This is not going to change the site’s currency, but it will pop up another window with a currency calculator. So the user has to do this every time she wants to see the prices in another currency different from GB Pounds.
Lufthansa
I could not hide my happiness when I saw the design presented by Lufthansa for its booking system, not even Expedia has something like this. The site displays a table combining the departure and return flight dates where the desired flight is marked. Changing selection is fast and easy. It is also very nice from Lufthansa to mark in yellow the lowest prices. Fantastic.
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Conclusion
I would not say that the British Airways site is bad, but Lufthansa found a much better design for its online booking service.
