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

https://twitter.com/pugson/status/1091699189166174208

by bfoks • 7 years ago

239 200 7 years ago

underwater• 7 years ago

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

jessriedel• 7 years ago

To play devil's advocate: this is tool for helping you to search for a product. The official transaction happens at the end when they show you the date, time, airports, costs, etc. all on one page and you click "approve". (Presumably, the date was correct there.) One can certainly argue that their sales process was misleading (if only due to incompetence on their part), but that's a slightly different complaint than they saying they didn't deliver the product you agreed to purchase.

happytoexplain• 7 years ago

Yes, that's an argument a lawyer might make, but I disagree with the premise: Any reasonable interpretation of "agreeing to purchase" takes into account the entire dialogue between the merchant and customer, in which case the merchant told the customer two different things, and the customer reasonably didn't notice that one was different. There's no reason to assume about which version the customer agreed to.

gpm2• 7 years ago

You mean: "I purchased a flight leaving on the 3rd Sunday in February".

But this should be the last resort. You should try and resolve it with customer service first. You should publicly complain about something like this anyways, so you might as well until after that doesn't resolve it before making a charge back.

jayalpha5• 7 years ago

You would be surprised how often my US credit card has saved my a... from insane European customer service.

Hello Wizzair :-)

jzwinck5• 7 years ago

petercooper2• 7 years ago

Even just labelling the days would help.

There's room for confusion with unlabelled days even when it's "right", though. The author says "Since when is Feb 2 on a Thursday", but I assume that's because he's used to a Sunday->Saturday layout on a calendar, whereas for me I'd assume the 2nd were a Friday based on that position as I'm used to Monday->Sunday calendars.

(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 ;-))

sturgill• 7 years ago

The thing is, the screenshot _has_ labeled days. The calendar helpfully labeled February 2 as a Thursday.

ghaff3• 7 years ago

Not the screenshot I'm looking at from the link. [ADDED: Ah, you have to click through on the twitter image. Yes, it's just flat-out wrong.]

Flockster• 7 years ago

This, I don't think it's an issue of week-start-conventions.

cbhl• 7 years ago

That sounds like l10n gone seriously wrong -- maybe they literally wrote something like translation_helper(0) in that header which translates to Monday in $asian language and Sunday in English.

ghaff3• 7 years ago

That calendar picker seems clearly somewhere between confusing and outright broken. [ADDED: Just broken. Click through and they do have incorrect days labeled.] But there are at least two conventions: Sun->Sat and Sat->Fri (or Mon->Sun); the US tends to be the former and Europe the latter.

They should label the days to minimize confusion--I come close enough to messing up reservations as it is--but there isn't really a universal standard for the layout of weeks.

Jedd5• 7 years ago

... the US tends to be the former and Europe the latter.

Australia is the latter, and so is most of Asia, and .. well, it's probably just bits of the USA that likes to have Sunday as the first day of the week. Date pickers in many US-originating software assume this, which is insanely frustrating for those of us not in the USA / not expecting / not wanting this.

romwell2• 7 years ago

Even just labelling the days would help
I assume that's because he's used to...

Perhaps you should actually look at the screenshot instead of assuming?

The column February 2nd is in is clearly labeled as Thursday. There's no room for ambiguity there.

It's a bug. #stopuserblaming

ghaff3• 7 years ago

It is. However, the screenshot they posted on twitter did not show the relevant part of the image unless you clicked through.

contravariant2• 7 years ago

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 'correction').

Edit: Apparently the image I was looking at wasn't the whole image.

ColinWright• 7 years ago

Click through and see the whole image.

contravariant2• 7 years ago

Oh, so they actually did indicate the weekdays. Sorry, twitter's crop of the image made it look like they just had a weirdly aligned calender.

dguo• 7 years ago

I purchased tickets on the AirAsia website recently, and I am confident that at least on Firefox, their date picker for the passenger's date of birth has an off by one bug. At least in my case, customer support was able to change the date.

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.

koolba• 7 years ago

Sounds like a time zone round trip issue. They’re likely using timestamps (say epoch millis) to represent dates and converting it incorrectly on display.

sk5t3• 7 years ago

Sounds like a fundamental misunderstanding about the difference between a birthdate and an instant on a timeline.

dan-robertson• 7 years ago

This mistake is quite easy to make in JavaScript. Dates are internally milliseconds since epoch but if you construct a date by giving year, month, day, you get midnight in the local timezone which may well be on a different day from midnight in UTC, so if you send back a unix timestamp or (trying to be clever) use UTC functions to get a date from a Date object, you may likely get an off by one error.

Falkon13132• 7 years ago

Might be even worse, a lot of systems only have some sort of DateTime object that automagically includes a time component (no real way to specify date-only except just using a plain string) and automagically tries to correct it based on some sort of cascade of system settings, configuration variables, application configuration, and user configuration. On a web app, those things probably exist at least on the client, server, and database, each potentially making their own attempt to 'fix' the data.

Working with dates in code is unnecessarily hard so naturally the results tend to be bug-ridden more often than not.

userbinator3• 7 years ago

I'm very curious how a bug like this could even happen. At a glance it doesn't appear to be the classic "ISO week-based year" 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't account for the off-by-2 error seen here.

Kaivo• 7 years ago

I looks as if they started their calendar year with January 1st on Sunday. Maybe they just never even bothered to align the dates with the week days.

yuchi• 7 years ago

I’ve been scratching my head about this too. I can’t find a way to introduce such a bug in a date picker. The only one I’m thinking is a off by one when reading the month/year.

For example an API with 0-11 months, and one with 1-12. You’d get info of the wrong month.

gpm2• 7 years ago

Can't be the month, it has the right number of days.

Can't be the year, 2018 and 2020 also don't have February 2 on Thursday.

It can't even be the month but only for the starting day, neither January nor March have their 2nd on a Thursday.

taormina• 7 years ago

Could've been hardcoded for an older year for a deadline? Never got implemented to use the correct calendar based on the year?

lultimouomo• 7 years ago

I sure hope not, because in that case that thing has been broken for the whole 2018!

throwaway4154152• 7 years ago

It's stupid to not have a yyyymmdd format anyway. The American mmddyyyy format causes a lot of confusion.

Falkon13132• 7 years ago

As another comment pointed out, just try it with a 2-digit year: https://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/monthly.html?year=19&mo...

thewizardofaus• 7 years ago

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 "unexpected error". The only browser that would work was chrome, it displayed the "missing" field (date of birth)...

megablast• 7 years ago

I have seen this on Jetstar in Australia recently. Disgraceful.

jzwinck5• 7 years ago

eBay had a bug sort of like this that prevented posting items for sale for about three years.

"Works on our machines!"

Sharlin4• 7 years ago

Seriously, UI components are hard. 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 much 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.

zozbot123• 7 years ago

UI components might be hard, but typing <input type="date"> into a HTML document is not hard, and it's enough for the browser to do the right thing here. This screwup was entirely self-inflicted, a consequence of ignoring the well-known best practices of authoring semantically-meaningful web documents, forms and apps.

tlb• 7 years ago

That's currently only supported by 86% of browsers. A few years ago when they might have designed it, that number as much lower.

See https://caniuse.com/#feat=input-datetime

Semaphor2• 7 years ago

Regarding input type="date"

Recommendation
While convenient where it works, the failure mode of type="date" and its associated date and time types is very poor. This makes it a risky choice that could leave users struggling to meet validation criteria.

[0] https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2019/01/html5-input-types/#...

Sharlin4• 7 years ago

For better or worse, 99.9% of the web uses custom datepickers, if not for other reason than the fact that <input type=date> is not supported by all the browsers out there.

cronos8989• 7 years ago

Sometimes the client want different look and behaviour for componet, not Just the simple HTML5 input

hn_throwaway_993• 7 years ago

If it's a "best-practice", I honestly don't know any large, consumer-facing websites that just use input type=date, mainly because that UI sucks in most cases.

Even in this case putting the dollar amounts in the dates, which is a very useful piece of information, would need a custom date control.

Splines• 7 years ago

Is that even a web browser? If you look at the full screenshot, (I'm not 100% familiar with iOS) it looks like an app launched from the app store?

jstanley3• 7 years ago

Right, but you don't need "smart people to converge on" an agreement as to whether or not the 2nd of February is a Thursday. That would seem to be pretty well-defined.

narsil• 7 years ago

Well it's likely the client/server time-zone mismatch was the cause here. It could be that everyone at AirAsia, or even the majority of passengers, saw the right dates, and this edge case was simply not considered.

Assuming a timezone mismatch, it wouldn't always show up because the date would have to cross a midnight boundary for the days to be different. Even if we assumed the servers used Malaysia time rather than UTC, that leaves 8 hours in a day where North American travelers could see the right day.

lugg• 7 years ago

Well defined, Gregorian? You're kidding right?

Sure it's "defined", but it's full of hacks to deal with whims of fancy.

Even the day of the week calculation is borderline moronic.

jorblumesea• 7 years ago

Yeah every other travel site seems to at least show you the proper date range. Let's not make excuses for shitty work, a date picker component isn't an NP Complete problem.

cube00• 7 years ago

Admitting you made a mistake and making it right isn't hard if you care about your customers.

ethbro• 7 years ago

Assuming that Air Asia's customer support's purpose is to care about customers, rather than enforce policy.

It seems the more legacy a business is, the more defensive and less proactive its customer service remit becomes (e.g. insurance and telecom).

lvs• 7 years ago

No, you're all making them hard. It was no problem to book a flight in 2005.

Tade0• 7 years ago

to me maybe the most important is everybody trying to implement their UI widgets from scratch

I see stopping efforts to roll one's own UI components unnecessarily as a rite of passage for a developer.

FactolSarin• 7 years ago

I think rolling your own datepicker is an important rite of passage. So is learning why you shouldn't use your hand-rolled component in production.

Kenji• 7 years ago

Good UI is hard, but it's also a solved problem since at least 25 years and idiots keep reinventing "solutions" the wrong way over and over again. I see developers frequently make mistakes that Windows 95 got right.

Sharlin4• 7 years ago

Yes, this was my point. Desktop environments have standard sets of battle-hardened components for good reasons.

arenaninja3• 7 years ago

Very much this. I work on a "web app" with all custom components, even the most basic input is a custom component... everything about it sucks. Keyboard navigation sucks and is redone poorly, dropdowns are godawful, styling them is no joy.

I don't know what our way out of this is. Everyone imagines their own UX and wants this or that thing to behave differently from everything else out there on the web. We'd have more usable webpages (and web apps) if we didn't spend most of our time reinventing the button... over and over and over

Andrex2• 7 years ago

If Web Components don't save us, nothing will.

Thankfully I'm pretty bullish on them (especially customized built-in elements.) The future is bright.

blablabla123• 7 years ago

Agree, IMHO virtually always one should pick HTML5 components or something that is very mature, otherwise a lot of care is needed for something that works everywhere.

On the other hand, the guy is aware of the concept of a date picker and misuses a third party website's calendar for his own. This is a bit naive.

sswu• 7 years ago

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't familiar with UTC time?

How can we design datetime libraries to prevent these issues? Or at least make it so that error-prone behaviors must be very explicit?

RyJones• 7 years ago

When I went to get global entry, there were tons of people showing up 12 hours early.

jzwinck5• 7 years ago

Wait, their customer facing UI only supports a timezone that virtually no humans use?

That doesn't sound like a datetime library design problem, it sounds like they totally neglected to use a datetime library at all.

repolfx• 7 years ago

Well, the problem is web apps, or seen another way, lack of good distribution mechanisms for desktop apps.

Write your frontend in Java 8 and you have access to a full blown date/time library that handles all the edge cases and has been well thought out. Do it in JS and you got bupkis.

kuroguro• 7 years ago

Feb 2 is _clearly_ in the Friday slot in that picture. /s

sokoloff• 7 years ago

It's obviously under the "Thu" label when you look at the uncropped picture.

Feb 2, 2019 is a Saturday in any event.

meroes• 7 years ago

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.

Eric_WVGG• 7 years ago

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.

scrumper• 7 years ago

Something's up. I got a letter a couple weeks back from my kid's school requesting a permission slip for a theater trip on Thursday Feb 2. Couldn't figure out how they landed on that date.

userbinator3• 7 years ago

This gets more interesting... Googling for "Thursday Feb 2, 2019", "Thursday February 2nd, 2019", etc. returns a surprisingly large number of results containing that exact string (but fortunately, far less than the number of results containing "Sat Feb 2 2019"). If it was a widespread issue, we should be seeing more news about it throughout the rest of the month.

thirdsun• 7 years ago

As someone else in this thread figured out, Feb 2 0019 was a thursday.

ropeladder• 7 years ago

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.

netsharc• 7 years ago

If you're never using them again, why not do a chargeback? (Apparently services like Uber or Airbnb ban you if you do this, so it's "mutually assured destruction"). Or call the airline and tell them how Kayak messed up.

jliptzin• 7 years ago

I find it hard to believe there is any combination of words you can say to an airline company to successfully refund a non-refundable ticket.

jzwinck5• 7 years ago

Air Asia, like many discount airlines, charges different fees depending on payment method. Paying by bank transfer carries roughly half the fee of paying by credit card. So a lot of people can't do chargebacks (which is part of the reason bank transfers have lower fees in the first place, less risk for the airline).

panarky• 7 years ago

This actually works.

I was flying AirAsia to Sulawesi last year, and 2 days before my flight the tsunami hit. Hotels destroyed, tourists evacuated from the island.

Even though they're trying to get people off the island, AirAsia refused to refund or even rebook my flight because it was nonrefundable.

Filed a chargeback, and got a response from AirAsia via the credit card issuer offering a refund if I would withdraw the chargeback.

Never again.

mav3rick• 7 years ago

That sucks. No transactions ? I think companies like Kayak can get way with loose consistency guarantees and just push the onus on the user or have some money saved to reimburse you. You should file a dispute with your CC.

jayalpha5• 7 years ago

This has happened with me and Sri Lanka airlines (tricky to book when they block VPNs, you are in China and they have a google captcha.). I ended up with two tickets, one via their website, one via Vayama. I complained and Sri Lanka airlines reimbursed me. Even got a free business class upgrade when I checked in :-)

healsjnr1• 7 years ago

I work on a hotel OTA and this and similar situations consume a disproportionate amount of our dev time, and I believe it should. So much travel software relies on third parties and problems with eventual consistency (read timeouts) mean that often either the customer is told their booking failed when it succeeded, or it fails after payment is taken.

We try to ensure that our support tools make these situations, and the resolutions, as clear as possible to our customer agents.

Ultimately, we are on the hook for this booking so it's in our interest to get it resolved for the customer so they are happy. Our stats show that this only happens to 0.5% of bookings, but if they aren't handled well, they take up a much larger amount of support time and then end up with an unhappy customer.

Over the last few years I've come realise that this is a fundamental cost of building travel software. You can't gloss over these problems or push them back on the customer, otherwise you simply won't have any customers left.

otterley• 7 years ago

0.5% is 1 out of 200 bookings. That's a pretty high failure rate!

anth_anm• 7 years ago

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.

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.

miaklesp• 7 years ago

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

jzwinck5• 7 years ago

There is some truth to this. A couple years ago I bought three tickets from AirAsia. A week before the flight there was a volcanic eruption which canceled all flights at the destination. They issued me a credit voucher for future flights. Half the credit expired before I next needed to travel to an airport they service.

I still use them because sometimes they are $300 cheaper. And they don't play hardball with luggage weights, unlike some full fare airlines like British ("Your bag is 7.8kg, the limit is 7kg, if you want to carry it on you need to remove five pieces of clothing and put them on yourself").

throwaway4154152• 7 years ago

"session timeout" is the worst thing that can happen when you'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's when you book flights for the wrong date. I'm wondering how common this mistake is.

topmonk2• 7 years ago

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.

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.

peteretep6• 7 years ago

That's too simple a read. There are many many many low-cost airlines in Asia, and AirAsia is rarely the cheapest for any given journey. They are -- however -- pretty reliable, reasonably well organized, and I travel with them regularly on the basis that they're not as cut-throat as some of the other low-cost options.

topmonk2• 7 years ago

That depends... to and from Malaysia they are often the cheapest. They also have the newly reduced 7kg carry on rule (from the pretty standard 10kg).

This is all subjective, of course, but I really don't see much of a difference between them and Peach, HK Express, or Scoot.

As a side note, Peach once double charged me for the same flight and wouldn't refund my purchase, saying it was because I used linux, and that is an unsupported OS. I contacted my credit card agency and they told me the best thing was to take the flight and charge it back after I flew, or they might cancel both tickets. You really have to be careful with these types of companies, but in my opinion, it's worth it if you pay attention.

yen223• 7 years ago

AirAsia used to store passwords in plaintext. I know this because they sent me my original password when I asked for a password reset

This was a couple years ago. I don't know if they've fixed it since.

edhelas• 7 years ago

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.

I made a mistake, during the booking my credentials were automatically filled in the passenger form, I didn't checked and I ended up booking two time the same flight for me, on the same plane, with the same passenger id.

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).

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€.

KLM, if you read me, your booking system is really fucked up. I can't understand that with the volume of order and the price of the tickets we don't have a bullet-proof system in place for years already.

saltcured• 7 years ago

More than once over the years, my wife has given herself an ordeal with reserving airfares and hotels and then had to go through website or phone support to try to untangle it. I watched it happen once, and diagnosed it as a crappy website using cookies/local storage for what appears to be a normal HTML form. This recurring flaw makes the reservation system completely unsafe with multiple tabs performing searches in parallel.

She has an almost compulsive habit to go through the booking process, pause on the final review screen with the "submit" button, and research other options in extra tabs before returning to submit the original order. The result is that she is looking at that previously rendered summary, presses submit, and gets a completely different configuration booked because the activity in the other tab contaminated the state of the pathetic web app.

Due to these experiences and others, I mistrust web programmers and try to avoid complex state. I defensively complete all my research, and then I start a fresh booking sequence in a private browser window to directly snipe the selection I desire.

dawhizkid• 7 years ago

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

drexlspivey• 7 years ago

Did you know that only 4% of humans live in the US?

aboutruby• 7 years ago

You are getting downvoted but bringing up a good point. A few commenters are talking about US laws when his Twitter profile says he is located in Poland.

Personally I think it's the same thing as assuming everyone is male. Also assuming everyone is a software engineer. etc.

throwmeback• 7 years ago

Oh, the classic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americentrism

godelski• 7 years ago

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.

gonyea2• 7 years ago

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.

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.

a_bonobo• 7 years ago

Which airport is that, BMK?

Similar thing in Germany - I used to live close to Frankfurt-Hahn in Germany, which is nowhere close to Frankfurt, it was renamed to Frankfurt-Hahn at the request of Ryanair.

Three times I bumped into people asking in which direction to walk to get in to get into Frankfurt - it's a 90 minutes drive...

jayalpha5• 7 years ago

That is nothing. Try flying to Australia and end up in Canada:

https://www.news.com.au/travel/world-travel/north-america/co...

transitorykris• 7 years ago

To add to the list, there was an attempt to change the name of the Stockton Airport to San Francisco-Stockton Regional Airport. About 80 miles from San Francisco.

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SFO-objection-grounds...

chiph• 7 years ago

I was there when it was just Hahn AB. When Ryanair & Air France took over after the base was closed [0] and renamed it, I knew something shady was going on. Cheap flight, but then a 2 hour bus ride to Frankfurt am Main. I bet people got angry after being fooled.

[0] Which was sad. All the pilots left with their F-16s to go to war, and the base was closed while they were gone, leaving their wives & families to pack up and return to the US.

newnewpdro2• 7 years ago

Poorly/ambiguously named airports seem like a common theme. They're often named after a nearby major city, despite being inconveniently far from the respective city.

peteretep6• 7 years ago

despite being inconveniently far from the respective city

Perhaps, but not in this specific case, where DMK is no further than BKK. I'd have some sympathy for someone trying to get to London and ending up anywhere other than LHR, LCY, or maaaybe LGW. "London Oxford Airport" and "London Ashford Airport" are particularly egregious.

fouc2• 7 years ago

I assume you're talking about DMK (Don Mueang International Airport) once called "Bangkok International Airport"

Technically it is in Bangkok, it's the same distance from downtown (Asoke) as it is to the newer BKK (Suvarnabhumi Airport), just north instead of east.

peteretep6• 7 years ago

DMK is very definitely in Bangkok. It’s about the same distance from the city center as BKK is.

Much like the support rep, I also hope you’ve learned to not assume that major, world-class cities only have one airport. Somehow I doubt you’d have made the same mistake in London or New York.

It’s very definitely not AirAsia’s fault that you didn’t check the airport code, and would have happened on any other DMK-based airline.

gonyea2• 7 years ago

Their website said “Bangkok”. I’ve traveled all over Asia and Europe without this problem.

innocenat• 7 years ago

This is especially funny.

DMK, which is presently served exclusively by LCC, is in Bangkok proper.

BKK, however, is NOT in Bangkok proper.

When I booked with AirAsia, it always said "Bangkok - Don Mueang (DMK)" in the booking page.

This is 100% your fault.

peteretep6• 7 years ago

I was sufficiently curious about this that I went and checked AirAsia's Wayback machine for this. AirAsia's flights moved around 1st of Oct 2012 from BKK to DMK. For this date, it shows two Bangkok options, listed as "Bangkok (DMK)" and "Bangkok (BKK)"[0]. By January 2013, only DMK is shown, as "Bangkok (DMK)"[1]. By the next year, it's labelled as "Bangkok - Don Mueang")[2].

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20121001094838/http://booking.ai...

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130107034342/http://booking.ai...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20140102040509/http://booking.ai...

actionowl• 7 years ago

Reads headline

What?!

AirAsia

Oh, yeah not surprised.

dewiz• 7 years ago

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

pmarreck• 7 years ago

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

fiatjaf• 7 years ago

This happens because people need pretty fancy UIs. And companies want to provide these UIs.

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.

Web browsers or other apps should and could be packed with nice UIs to browse these APIs.

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't be necessary at all (who wants a flashy colorful experience when buying tickets?).

colanderman• 7 years ago

Many big companies barely get HTTP correct. (Side-effects on GET… site breakage on back button…) I have very little hope that most could get a more complex protocol working to even a basic degree.

dymv• 7 years ago

http://yourcalendricalfallacyis.com/

rapind• 7 years ago

It's pretty ridiculous how long we've been stuck with javascript or dropdown datepickers.

I realize it's subtlety complex to internationalize but it's been a common input on forms for so long you'd assume native browser support would have been present in every browser at least a decade ago. It's baffling to me that you still can't reliably use the input type of date due to lack of support.

IChrisI• 7 years ago

To be fair, custom Javascript on a website can do things that are too rare to be baked into general browser behavior, such as adding colors or icons or text to certain dates, date-range validation, disallowed dates, etc.

ratsmack• 7 years ago

What'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.

pas3• 7 years ago

It seems simply employees got the task of dealing with it. But not doing anything would seem bad, so ... they reply as if every new subthread would be a genuine "bug report".

Amazing instance of how not to do teh twitter if you are a corporation.

seanhandley• 7 years ago

They rebooked him for the correct dates: https://twitter.com/pugson/status/1091946878072049664

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

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