One of the main points of criticism against my rather controversial, death-threat worthy posts regarding Cebu Pacific's dismal service and the involvement of software development company Navitaire was that they found my posts too negativist and tried to bully me into suggested that I criticize more constructively.
In that case, I do hope Navitaire employees, both former and current, do open their minds and keep themselves from wanting to kill me while I attempt to provide some unsolicited advice, which I hope moves towards a more "positive" and "constructive" analysis of the system at hand.
First I want to acknowledge that some of the errors, particularly, some stray footers, have been fixed and have ceased to be an unsightly annoyance, and let it be known that the fact that errors are being mitigated is something deeply appreciated.
Second, I want to clarify a bit about my background as a software developer. I have been writing software in .NET's Microsoft technologies in both Windows forms (desktop applications) and ASP.NET (browser-based/web applications) for almost five years now. I have also dabbled in some minor web design, and have been practicing quite a bit of CSS for the past few years. These technologies are (apparently) precisely what Navitaire's Sky Sales system is made of (as evidenced by the ASP.NET/C# job postings they have in Jobstreet, and the .aspx file extension of the web pages of Sky Sales).
Let it also be clear that I am quite lazy in fixing WordPress templates and do not really care if they are XHTML compliant, as one of the commenters enjoyed the Phyrric victory of pointing out in one of the posts.
Thus I am awfully familiar with the pain of having a consistent look and feel across various browsers, and various versions of those browsers in major platforms. I too dread Internet Explorer 6.0 and its freakishly difficult quirks mode of CSS rendering. I too know that what looks good in Firefox might appear in an entirely different manner when viewed on a Mac's Safari browser. It's a gargantuan task and I recognize that.
Unfortunately someone has to do it.
A friend, who works for a major online computer retail store in the US, has seven to nine virtual machines on his workstation, each running a different type of browser, just to be able to check consistency of his work in the sites he works on.
So, while it is immensely difficult to obtain a consistent look and feel and to make sure div tags don't end up all around the page, neither is it impossible, and is achievable through some considerable effort on the part of the software developer.
However, if you really, really can't make the site work on all versions of all browsers, at least inform the customers on which browsers the site would work best. JobsDB.com did this by outright locking out people from using any browser other than Internet Explorer for their site. A javascript popup informing the user that they may experience inconsistencies in user experience with the browser they are using and it is best to use this application in Browser X version Y will at least let the customers know to expect problems and ignore them. This is called the Principle of Least Astonishment.
On the other hand, I will stand by my opinion that the disambiguation between the status of payment and reservation is utterly confusing to customers and that Navitaire will be better off simplifying this system. Sure, Navitaire software developers will accuse me of "not having common sense", but the truth is probably 90% of the users who will use the system also won't have any common sense just like me. They do not know that processing foreign credit cards, for example, takes time and is one of the reasons payment should have to be confirmed. They will not understand why you can confirm the reservation but not confirm the payment when they've already provided all necessary credit card details and requirements.
Likewise, it would totally blow up on their face if their payments are still unconfirmed on the day of their flight, as what several disgruntled passengers attested in the blog comments. If Cebu Pacific and Navitaire do not see this as a catastrophic failure, then I don't know what would qualify as failure for them.
For the record, based on comments, it is the Treasury Department of Cebu Pacific that is messing up in this part -- they are the ones approving payments for all the reservations. Why it appears that the process is manual in a supposedly automated process is beyond me.
Finally, though this should come from Cebu Pacific -- it should inform users that they are undergoing system changes at the moment and they are working on it and they are sorry. A simple, sincere apology is deeply appreciated by consumers.
In the end it's all about genuine concern for customers. My pointing out errors on Navitaire's system shouldn't be a big enough deal to merit a death threat because users see those issues every single day anyway. It wasn't as if I logged in to the system specifically to find those errors. The errors I found are horrible user experiences my non-techie wife took while trying to do her everyday work as a travel agent.
A commenter told us that Cebu Pacific will be able to finish ironing out all the issues by the end of May. I wish they do finish by that time, and maybe things will be better.
