Typically if I’m talking about US Airways, I’m complaining. This airline, at least in Philadelphia, normally seems unconcerned with providing any kind of passable customer service. However, today I discovered a feature in their new reservation system that made me positively happy. As you can see over to the right (yellow highlight mine), when the city name is typed into the text field, the form uses some kind of AJAXy, Google Suggest-style functionality to autofill based on what the user has begun to type.

Personally, I use these online travel engines a lot to scope out possible trips, and I get very frustrated by the ineffectiveness of the “airport finder”. (Often times, if the airport code is not specified and only a city name is provided, the page refreshes and forces the user to make another choice before continuing.) This particular feature, however — although somewhat minor in the grand scheme of this page — makes finding the airport code for the city in question much, much easier to do.

Bravo USAir! It’s about time!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 1st, 2006 at 7:10 pm and is filed under web UI, AJAX. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.