Buying plane tickets online (sucks!)

I finally got around to buying my plane tickets for Christmas yesterday, and because of that I plan to avoid buying tickets again for as long as possible. (Here comes the rant)

Now I know I should have bought these tickets a while ago, but it just didn't happen. The time was...

3pm - I searched around trying to find a ticket that would cost less than $900 and wouldn't require me to be in IA for half of December, and... it wasn't easy. My dates to get back home were pretty flexible, so I tried a bunch of different combinations to see what would be a good fit. This took a while, but I expected that. It's too bad there isn't a tool that can give you that sort of info faster... searching with the "my dates are flexible" button on websites never seems to give me any good results...

3:15 - I've plotted all the prices, figured out when it is cheap enough that it would be worth flying out of SFO, and pretty much decided the dates - within a day or two. I'd heard that buying tickets directly from the airlines was sometimes cheaper, so I found my flight on travel.yahoo.com and then searched for those days on American Airlines' website (I'm not going to link to these, because I'm still pissed about the whole thing). American's website had tickets for those days for about $150 less, so I was happy and started the process of buying them. By the 3rd step in their six step process, things weren't looking good - it was asking me to enter my passenger info, but it wasn't showing any fields for me to use. After trying it a couple of times, I figure there's a problem with Safari - so I load up the same thing in IE. I get the same tickets at the same price, and when I get to the passenger info page, it wants me to log in. Of course I don't have an account, so I have to create one. It takes about 5 minutes, and when I'm done it doesn't take me back to my flight info.

3:30 - I search again, and... oh look - the price just went up by $50. Great. It's still cheaper, so I continue entering my info... credit card info, billing info, ticket delivery, etc. I click 'continue' after entering the things in step 5 (note: step 6 is 'finished). The browser takes a long time to reload things, and when it's done I'm back at step 1, where it says "there was an error booking the flight, please choose another". Grrr.

3:40 - I search again, and find the same flight. Maybe it was just a server error. I go through all the steps again. Step 5 leads directly to..... step 1. Same error.

3:50 - (this would all be faster if their websites would rerender the next page in less than 30 seconds. Using IE wasn't helping). I search again, and find the same flight. But I don't choose that one. I found another flight for about the same price. Repeat all steps. Unfortunately, that included getting the same error.

4:00 - OK. Maybe it's a Mac browser/java/voodoo thing. I try it on Lisa's PC.

4:15 - Nope. Same problem there. I try it again while I call American on the phone. I'm initially impressed by the voice recognition software that asks me for flight info, and actually gets my responses right. It says I can say "agent" at any time to get out of this system, but it was working fine so far. Until it asks me for my account number, and gets 50% of the characters wrong. I try again, still gets it wrong. Again; wrong. "Agent"; "I didn't understand your response". "Agent"; "I didn't understand your response". "AGENT!!"; "One more time... I didn't understand your response". I silently fume. It puts me on hold. Around this time the website gives me the same error again.

4:25 - I am on hold. Some lady gets on the other end of the phone, and tries to find the flights I wanted. At some point I mention that these are United flights that were listed on the American website. The only flights she can find for me are $900+, and all the cheaper flights are booked. She can't find the flights I mentioned, since they aren't as easy to find in their system. She recommends that I try United's site, since American evidently has bad information about the United flights, despite the fact that they are listed on the American website. She offers to transfer me to tech support for the website, but I can't imagine that would get me any closer to a flight. I thank her for trying, since it isn't really her fault that their system sucks.

4:40 - I've given up on American Airlines website (and phone number), and I'm back to travel.yahoo.com. It will be more expensive, but at least it should _work_. And after a short detour from my forgotten password, it did, and I had my tickets by 5pm.

The internet. Making our lives more pleasant every day.