I have chosen the wrong flight dates because your date picker is broken

I ended up booking two flights recently because Kayak sent me a "booking failed" email after I tried once, it failed, then tried again, and it worked. Then an hour later I got an email from Kayak saying my flight booking had failed. So of course I booked another flight. They would NOT admit the slightest wrongdoing. Never using them again.

Seriously, UI components are <i>hard</i>. Even a lowly button is difficult to get right, where ”right” means ”whatever smart people have converged on after 30 years of GUIs”. Anything more complex than a button is much <i>much</i> harder. There are a lot of things wrong with the whole ”web app” concept but to me maybe the most important is everybody trying to implement their UI widgets from scratch. And I say this as someone whose job used to be writing and maintaining a webapp UI framework.

I purchased tickets on the AirAsia website recently, and I am confident that at least on Firefox, their date picker for the passenger&#x27;s date of birth has an off by one bug. At least in my case, customer support was able to change the date.<p>Edit: I am confident because I purchased multiple tickets with multiple passengers and also had someone double check that I filled out the info correctly. All the date of births ended up being one day later than they should have been.

Even just labelling the days would help.<p>There&#x27;s room for confusion with unlabelled days even when it&#x27;s &quot;right&quot;, though. The author says &quot;Since when is Feb 2 on a Thursday&quot;, but I assume that&#x27;s because he&#x27;s used to a Sunday-&gt;Saturday layout on a calendar, whereas for me I&#x27;d assume the 2nd were a Friday based on that position as I&#x27;m used to Monday-&gt;Sunday calendars.<p><i>(Update: OK, the days ARE labelled - incorrectly. You have to click on the screenshot on Twitter to see the full screenshot. Keeping this comment here for posterity only ;-))</i>

What&#x27;s even more sad about the Twitter thread is that AirAsia Support is responding to everyone that commented in the thread. The responses must be automatically generated and triggered by any one of the comments... Something is definitely wrong with their system.

Charge back? &quot;I purchased a flight leaving on a) Thursday b) Feb 2. Product did not meet requirements.&quot;

AirAsia is a flaming disaster. I remember booking a flight out of Bangkok. Well, it turns out that I actually booked a flight out of the once named Bangkok airport, which isn’t actually even in Bangkok.<p>I complained and the “support” rep said “I hope you learned your lesson.” So I called my bank and disputed the charge, getting a full refund. Apparently they never figured out how to challenge my dispute. I hope they don’t learn that lesson.

I&#x27;m very curious how a bug like this could even happen. At a glance it doesn&#x27;t appear to be the classic &quot;ISO week-based year&quot; problem discussed on HN a few times before, but somehow the code thinks Feb 1 2019 is a Wednesday... weeks starting with Sun vs Mon wouldn&#x27;t account for the off-by-2 error seen here.

&quot;session timeout&quot; is the worst thing that can happen when you&#x27;re trying to book tickets. The whole experience or booking flying tickets is awful and generally takes a lot ot time. When this happens and you need to refill information that&#x27;s when you book flights for the wrong date. I&#x27;m wondering how common this mistake is.

Hm. I ordered a hotel room for today (Saturday, Feb 2) earlier in the week, and was messaged asking what time I would be checking in on Thursday the 2nd. I wonder if the big is in a common industry tool.

It&#x27;s pretty ridiculous how long we&#x27;ve been stuck with javascript or dropdown datepickers.<p>I realize it&#x27;s subtlety complex to internationalize but it&#x27;s been a common input on forms for so long you&#x27;d assume native browser support would have been present in every browser at least a decade ago. It&#x27;s baffling to me that you still can&#x27;t reliably use the input type of date due to lack of support.

Is anyone else weirded out by how the AirAsia twitter account is responding to the comments? It looks like automated responses but then signs with an employee name.

This is a discount airline. They employ all kinds of tactics to part money from the customer, excessive credit card fees on top of a lousy exchange rate, very small baggage allowance hidden in the fine print, useless insurance offers, etc.<p>You should be examining the confirmation screen extremely closely with an airline like this. Go ahead and blame them if you want to, but they make money on price, not reputation, and the market has chosen price over quality of service.

I once tried to book flights on a popular airline website. I used four different web browsers and each one displayed the content differently, all resulting in &quot;unexpected error&quot;. The only browser that would work was chrome, it displayed the &quot;missing&quot; field (date of birth)...

I ran into a similar issue applying for Global Entry. Luckily an appointment at 3am on Saturday suggested the times were in UTC. Nevertheless this was unnecessary uncertainty and anxiety - what about those who aren&#x27;t familiar with UTC time?<p>How can we design datetime libraries to prevent these issues? Or at least make it so that error-prone behaviors must be very explicit?

A few months ago I had to book a round-trip and one-way trip with the same flight for the first trip. Naturally you cannot do that in one go so I book the two things in two different orders.<p>I made a mistake, during the booking my credentials were automatically filled in the passenger form, I didn&#x27;t checked and I ended up booking two time the same flight for me, on the same plane, with the same passenger id.<p>Fun fact, when I check-in for the first ticket, then the second, the website told me that I was already checked-in (which shows that internally the two tickets were seen as one).<p>I called the support and they reimbursed me the second (one-way) ticket. I had to book another flight the same day which cost me around 300€.<p>KLM, if you read me, your booking system is really fucked up. I can&#x27;t understand that with the volume of order and the price of the tickets we don&#x27;t have a bullet-proof system in place for years already.

They rebooked him for the correct dates: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;pugson&#x2F;status&#x2F;1091946878072049664" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;pugson&#x2F;status&#x2F;1091946878072049664</a>

AirAsia used to store passwords in plaintext. I know this because they sent me my original password when I asked for a password reset<p>This was a couple years ago. I don&#x27;t know if they&#x27;ve fixed it since.

In the US by LAW you have 24 hours to cancel a non-refundable flight penalty free...not sure why you&#x27;d freak out in that case if you accidentally booked the wrong flight or date.

This happens because people need pretty fancy UIs. And companies want to provide these UIs.<p>We should be using text and structured data for all services by default. Companies should be providing simple, very simple text (or JSON if you want that) APIs by default and people should and could learn to use them.<p>Web browsers or other apps should and could be packed with nice UIs to browse these APIs.<p>Optionally, after these default browsable easy-to-use APIs were working, people could translate them into more fancy UIs, but for most things, like booking flights, that wouldn&#x27;t be necessary at all (who wants a flashy colorful experience when buying tickets?).

<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;yourcalendricalfallacyis.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;yourcalendricalfallacyis.com&#x2F;</a>

This is what happens when you write your own datepicker library... or crypto library, for that matter

Feb 2 is _clearly_ in the Friday slot in that picture. &#x2F;s

[OT] ...and I had to uninstall twitter to be able to read the linked tweet (because I didn’t want to log in)

&gt; Reads headline<p>What?!<p>&gt; AirAsia<p>Oh, yeah not surprised.

I was heading back home for a month. I went and took my dog to the kennel, bussed down to the airport. Was all ready to go after a couple days getting ready.<p>Went to check in and realized my flight was 6 weeks in the future. They let me cancel, but a flight that day was hundreds more and I wound up sitting at the airport all day. I triple check when I book flights with google flights now.

It&#x27;s not a bug, it&#x27;s they business model. Why do you think that are so cheap and so successful at the same time?

Had something similar trying to schedule a phone interview. The confirmation email text gave a time 3 hours before the date picker time displayed on their site. I spoke to them on the phone to manually schedule me and then we ran into a problem where there were no daily saving time zones so I had to give myself a two hour window to be sure.

Assuming people start their weeks on the same day as you do is risky at best, but interestingly this case looks like they corrected the wrong way around, resulting in a week that starts on Tuesday rather than Sunday (or Monday, which it may have been before the &#x27;correction&#x27;).<p>Edit: Apparently the image I was looking at wasn&#x27;t the whole image.