#3 My American Airlines Reservation Experience

Today I am going to talk about my experience with the American Airlines flight reservations web application.

The way the process works on the page is that first you select your starting point and your destination. While the system checks for available flights it lets you know that something is happening by displaying a message indicating that the possible flights are being looked for. Then you get a list of the possible flights and the total value of them for you to select. Afterwards you continue through a series of steps that will request your personal and other required information to book your flight. In my experience I can say that the page is very intuitive letting you know easily the information it is requesting from you at every moment. Also after you confirm every step and the page is loading the next one there is always an indicator letting you know that the system is doing something (sometimes not knowing if something is happening or if you has didn’t click the continue button yet can be annoying).

I also found the page to be well designed, without any distracting promos or on-the-side information not necessary for your booking, restricting only to displaying the information that you need or they require you to fill, this is very helpful making it easy to understand and not get lost in the process.

One of the features I found very useful as well, and one which sometimes is not found in web sites were you have to execute a full processes, was the fact that at the top of the page there was a breadcrumb-like list showing every step of the process. This not only allows the user to easily identify in which step of the process he is and how many steps are left to finish, but also allows you to go back to any previous step in case you realize that you want to make any change on your reservation.  I remember this very clearly because when I tried to do the same on other airlines in the past, I run into the issue of trying to change for example the return date that I had previously selected and there was no way of going back into the process to select again, and the only possibility was to completely cancel the process and start over again from scratch. That to me was very frustrating.

Breadcrumb-like process step list

Overall, I’d say that the application is well developed, helpful and easy to use, all the information you require is displayed at the right time and provides useful options for navigating through the process seamlessly.