Would you use an 'Expert Mode' Booking Engine?

Definitely.

With 200000 miles to use and an intense dislike of call centres that would be a Yabadaba Yes

wow- yes please!

Very much so, will save lots of repeat trawling through the booking system and in theory help to reduce tel call loading to FC.

Just need VS to be more flexible with eligible fares and they'll have some extremely happy flyers..

Note: This topic is 18 months old.

Good to see it bumped up!

Got to be a resounding yes all round!

This thread is from January 2009....

I would definitely love to see this, again, as long as the bookings are direct into VS and VF is not acting as an agent.

A big YES from me too. Even if the idea is 18 months old, it would be very useful. As many others have said, it will save time searching, save time to the FC call centre and ultimately get more people to book there and then.

Cheers

Martin

Yes please, from me too !

Yes!, Yes, Yes, and YES again!

Peter Stansfield

Sounds good to me - YES

I thought VS had one which was based on classes?

[Pete]

The coding didn't happen at Virgin's end, unfortunately, but this may be a good time to bring it up with them again.

100% - A very much needed feature!

Oh yes - without doubt it would get used by me!

A

Just to get my head round this; the booking egine would sit directly on vflyer, and be linked into the booking engine on the VS website?

If that is the case, I have to say, whilst a good idea in theory, in practice, I can see it being a total nightmare.

As it stands already, the booking engine on VS lags behind the availibility on Vega which is visible to contact centre staff. If there was an option to see exact fare codes, MpM availibity or Upgrade code availibilty, I can easily see more scenarios where pax will check on this tool, only to ring up and find that becuase the system lags those fares are no longer availible.

As a member of CC staff, we have enough problems already explaining this lag to pax.

A good idea, but untill the Website is synced every second with Vega, it'll never work.

Would be great - and if they can include the ability to search and show 'G' fares too I would be very happy!

A good idea, but untill the Website is synced every second with Vega, it'll never work.

Well, ideally they wouldn't be synchronizing two different booking engines, but simply building a decent API into the one system of record, and cleaning up their code. In fact, I'd be surprised if we were actually looking at two separate booking "tools" that were being synced. Could be some bad caching methodology, or even screwed up locking code, or locking code that is optimized more for performance than clean record handling. It happens. Whatever it is, it might not be too easy to clean up, so the end result is the same - won't change quickly.

Absolutely, would use it 100% of the time. I'm a recent FC member but have racked up 100k this year. Frustrated by the lack of options to consider when spending miles and fed up with calling customer service to ask about options. Esp need to search for L and U fares. Amazed by bad value of miles plus money fares, would be better if you could have more options for proportion of cost put forward by miles and by money.

I have however just found this link which is useful.

http://www.virgin-atlantic.com/en/gb/bo ... /index.jsp

cheers,
P

Absolutely I would - I don't know what you have in mind in detail, but it could get complicated!

For example, the kinds of query I would really like is:
* Show me all G availability for a given route across, say, one month.
* Multiple sectors - possibly different fare codes.

Also, I often want to do something like bbok a revenue ticket, plus use AMEX PE upgrades and miles - so different fare codes in a booking....

Might be an idea, as well, as you select or browse the fare codes, for the text to pop up showing details of that fare code?

To be honest, unless V-flyer gets a commission for each such booking, I'd rather that VS get their act together and sort out the online booking system!

YES - anyway!

I'm not at all technical but have read all the input with interest.

My simpleton's answer would be a YES y)

R-P

It would be brilliant... Is there any update on how it's coming along?

[honey lamb]

Well given that the original post was exactly two years ago, it's quite possible it never left the drawing board

[Pete]

I'll admit it seemed more possible back then, but it's something I still badger VS about from time to time


.... one day maybe we'll see something!