Is Portal Mission Critical?

For an airline, there are a number of mission - critical systems. The list probably starts with air traffic control that allows any plane to fly. Then there are network / schedule planning, maintenance and variety of other systems. So how does a consumer - facing web portal rank on that list?

Well, I think it pretty much is a mission critical system for an airline today. Certainly none of the low cost airlines could do without that, as they completely offload any customer - related processes to that. They are also restricting travel agents from having middleman access (which in some cases might server as a backup...). Legacy airlines seem not to be entirely reliant on their web portals, but the question is how much does a broken portal affect an airline company performance?

Certainly it seems Lufthansa does not consider their web portal important for their business.

Being a Lufthansa frequent flyer, with close to 200k miles traveled in 2019 alone, I use (or try to use) that portal equally frequently. Usually it s**ks. But recently it has been a total disaster. To make seat reservations I ended up using an incognito mode in Chrome, clearing cookies every time I wanted to get to lufthansa.com. It is a bit better now - I mean it works - but the overall experience is terrible. The pages load very slowly and the whole UI jumps around as parts of the pages load delayed by many seconds. You start doing something and are about to click when the button moves down by a half of the page. You want to paste in your booking reference code, and after you do, the page does field initialization and clears what you've just pasted. My patience resources have just been drained completely.

It is just unimaginable for me how they ended up with that mess. Seems like all internal tests they run were testing static mockups, not live pages. And I wonder if they correlate somehow the impact of that disaster with an inevitable drop in sales... Seems like they don't, as otherwise that would have never happened or would be extinguished immediately.