When Computers Mess It All Up

I was going to write about some serious matters but that is going to be postponed until one of the upcoming weeks. I am now at an airport after spending lovely / funny 5 hours recovering from a canceled flight. Flight cancelations are not that unusual and I seem to attract them frequently, so this rarely raises my tension. Just don't fight or get angry at things you don't control. 

So I was supposed to be on a 6am flight from Krakow to Frankfurt and then to Chicago. That means getting up around 4am (yes Krakow is a lovely airport which takes about 15 minutes to pass the security check, or even less for the priority line). But I woke in the middle of the night and saw a notification from Lufthansa about the canceled Frankfurt flight.

They offered an automated session with a bot to rebook. A rebooking bot is such a nice idea. Click, examine the available options, select one that suits you and voila - you are booked on a new flight.

Unless you aren't.

The Lufthansa bot confirmed my itinerary change from 6a KRK-FRA-ORD to 7:35a KRK-VIE-ORD and offered a link to check-in with Austrian Airlines. The link launched a new Austrian web page which - unfortunately - could not find my reservation, neither using the booking code nor the ticket number. Forget it, I thought, advancing my alarm clock from 4a to 5:30a (a great gift of an extra hour and a half of sleep). I showed up at the airport early (no traffic on Saturdays) but the check-in agend had bad news for me: "your ticket is broken", there are no VIE nor ORD segments on it, you need to go to the ticket counter. They did not have access rights to fix this at check-in. So I went.

Being 4th in the queue did not sound too bad considering close to 1 hour until the departure. But then I realized the first unlucky guy spent 20 minutes there. 20 times 4 meant I would miss the Austrian flight. I tried calling the Lufthansa service center. Of course - Saturday - they were closed. So I called Lufthansa USA-  just to learn the waiting time was very long. Then I called Lufthansa Hong-Kong (the trick that saved me some years ago when all European call centers were overloaded), but they were closed too.

There was no other option but wait. And while I was waiting the flight to Vienna took off.

It has been 11 years since I last covered airline reservation systems. Many things have changed, but the net effect is not that much better. Computers make a mess and humans are needed to clean this all up. And it seems the success rate has not improved that much. 11 years is a lot. Elon Musk can build a self driving car in a year. And the airline industry still has not been able to successfully automate the very basic process of rebooking a flight.

Note: in 2011 I said the Lufthansa mobile app strategy was good. It was not. Or maybe the strategy was but the execution has not been successful. In any case, there is a huge, huge gap in the experience offered by the United app (one I use very often) and the Lufthansa app. And probably the most disappointing part is how these airline systems fail to properly talk to each other, unable to transfer basic information. The bots and AI won't help if the basic APIs do not interoperate reliably.