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    (Wed Jan 7/09)

Machines may speak english but they aren't human

A few days back I was trying to book a flight on Porter Airlines - a small airline which flies out of the only downtown airport here in Toronto.  After hearing rave reviews of their excellent in-person service, I was absolutely shocked at how badly their poorly built website reflected such reviews.

After spending nearly an hour trying to submit site registration and payment processing forms across two browsers (Firefox and Safari on a Mac) to no avail, I threw up my hands in dispair and attempted to simply book over the phone or at least let the supposedly good fellows @ Porter know their website is broken and won't communicate this to me in a simple message I can understand; instead forcing me to figure out nuances of its irregular behaviour through not blatantly appearing disfunctional...  Well, they don't operate as late as I was awake trying to solve this issue (11PM-ish) and only have a contact form without a field for attachments - so the screenshots I tried to send them to help them diagnose their web problems couldn't be sent!!! 

Alas, after some googling I found some potential contact email addresses, composed the following message and mailed it off - the message bounced from two addresses but supposedly went through to info@ yet, I never got an email response from them?

Oddly enough, I was able to make the booking/transaction with no hiccups today - and their site mentions nothing of having experienced problems recently...

Here's what I tried to send them... Note: the screenshots are embedded in this post and reference with numbers in the message below:

Hey guys,

Being a web professional who notices such things, I thought to drop you a quick line to say that your website is spewing Javascript errors to users' browsers - particularly, the screenshot attached was taken when I tried to email my itinerary for a flight I just finished paying for - and that was in Safari on my Mac; Firefox wasn't processing any forms at all - including site registration and booking forms!?!

Also, a 'default' status doesn't really mean anything to me, your customer - some commonspeak would really make your user experience much more fluid.  You'll see in this screenshot below that I also was returned an empty confirmation number?

[Picture 1]

Note: your site did take my credit card information and then return a screen with all the information I had entered when booking the ticket(s) but I don't think the payment was actually processed - the returned screen has a red 'Pending payments balance' despite showing an amount paid on the screen!? (see below)  I'll have to call VISA to see whether a payment was actually processed.

[Picture 2]

Overall, I must say that I was very disappointed with how broken your website is... If I need to still make this booking I will call you tomorrow.

q./

[Picture 3]

Email reply

Here's the response I just received - nearly 2 weeks later:

Hello Qasim Virjee,

We apologize for the inconvenience this situation has caused you. We have spoken with our IT department regarding your email, this website error is currently being investigated.

We do appreciate that you took the time to send us the details of this error, we are forwarding your email to our IT department for further investigation and resolution. Please rest assured that they are meeting frequently in order to improve our website.

If you have any further questions, please contact our Call Centre at 1-888-619-8622. An agent will be available to assist you Monday through Sunday, 6am to 10pm EST.

We look forward to assisting you with future travel.

Sincerely,

Porter Customer Care

**Do not respond to this email address directly, if this email did not provide a sufficient answer to your inquiry, please contact our call centre

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