Website Problems for Mac Users

[CLT-Douglas]

More reasons why the only award this new website should get is a Razzie Award.

Those using Apple computers can not check in for flights let alone book a flight using Apple's browser Safari. US Airways acknowledge the problem and said the new reservations system is designed to work with Microsoft browsers on PCs. The fix for Macs is in the works but it will be June at the earliest before any problems can be fixed.

Mac users not apple of US Airways system's eye

To give you a personal update since I run off a Mac. It is true Safari does not work with the US Airways website. If you try and select a flight it gives you a error saying invalid date even though the date is correct. It lets you see the flights but if you try to push purchase it give you another error and won't let you. That is about as far as I have gotten with that.

Firefox seems to work the best for me for their website. I was able to book a flight, and today was able to check in and print a boarding pass. I am lucky from what I understand from other Mac users. The boarding pass however printed small. It's still readable but it's about half the size that it should be comparing it to the old style printable boarding passes. I don't know if this is going to cause me problems or not later today. Maybe an agent here can give me the heads up if they have seen this and let me know if it will or not. There is also no bar scan like the old style, I don't know if it should or should not include one I am not sure.

 

[CynicalResAgent]

This is ridiculous. Any halfway decent web designer knows to check a websites operation on the top four or five web browsers. I used to design websites and I always double checked to make sure it funtcioned in IE, Navigator, AOL, firefox and Safari. I just did this as a side job working out of my house and I made sure it would work and this multi billion dollar company will let their website sit with out a fix till june.

I am so glad I took early out. To all my ex-coworkers I wish you the best of luck and I am always hoping good things for US workers but I don't have a good feeling about the company's fourtunes. I'm working as a travel agent now and to be honest I have to sometimes steer people away from US because they are failing to deliver even a decent coach product now.

Seriously all stakeholders should demand changes now.

 

[CLT-Douglas]

The scary thing about this is that there is no mention on the website on what Mac users should do for the time being. If a person calls into Res and explains they are trying to book a ticket on a Mac at least don't charge them the fee to do so. Atleast give a warning to try another browser besides Safari.

I know there is not a ton of people using Macs, but if I had to guess I would say perhaps 10% of users are using a Mac. That may be even a little conservative. So they are fully aware that right out of the gates on a good day that at most they can only serve about 90% of potential customers trying to buy online. If I wasn't aware to try Firefox I would have just given up and booked on another airline.

 

[CynicalResAgent]

The other thing this says is that they don't care about capturing revenue from the "mac demographic" since most macs are upper end machines (cost more than the average pc) I'd make a reasonable guess that mac users as a whole earn more than the typical bus passenger demographic that this airline seems to be going after.

flame on!

 

[PHL]

Yawwwwn.. HO hum. The old mac vs. PC arguments begin.....

Macs constitute about 4% of the PC market. It's been this way since the Mac was introduced in 1994. Great machine, great technology, great Operating System. But so was the Beta video. Marketing savvy wins every time...

Mac owners are not necessarily any more or less affluent than a PC owner, either. I can show you some PCs that cost more than their equally powered Mac counterpart. Mac owners often fall into a certain user group, like audio/visual related folks (Tv, film, music, etc.) or publishing (newspaper, mag, etc.). The Macs used to have the education market locked up, but that's even been eroded over the years.

It was a bad business decision to not support Safari, and that was based on priorities. It is quite easy for the IT dept. to see exactly WHAT browsers constitute the most traffic to the site. The stats bear those numbers in black and white. If Safari really did make up 10% (or more) of the user base, a much higher priority would have been given to make the site compatible.

I've been on other sites where my Safari browser (yes, I run a Mac) didn't work quite well. So, it's always good to have a copy of Firefox or IE for Mac installed as a backup.