Monday, April 13, 2009

More seat assignment woes

Today's prize of most idiotic software design or implementation goes to...

Rearden Personal Travel Assistant.

This is the new frontend that replaced Cliqbooks (which was pretty retarded in its own ways) to allow me to book travel with our corporate travel agency.

It has this cool "feature" that if you tell it you prefer, say, aisle seats, and then you book a flight that doesn't have aisles available, it keeps checking for you to see if your preference opens up. Unfortunately, somehow it can't see what seat I actually have once I change it on the airline's own website.

So, a couple of days ago, a fairly full flight from Boston to SFO on Wednesday suddenly showed an aisle seat in EXIT ROW open up. I immediately grabbed it.

8am sharp the next morning, the Rearden Assistant moved me to an available middle seat... because well, it couldn't see where I was, and I guess determined that it must be a non-aisle seat so it moved me to the only thing that was available ... a middle seat. Thanks!

This evening thinking I was crazy after moving myself to a different open aisle exit row seat that opened up earlier this evening (the one I was moved out of was gone now) I then called AA to ask them about this. They confirmed that my travel agent moved me out of 9D into 25B and she confirmed I was definitely showing as being in 9C now, and I'm willing to bet that tomorrow at 8am sharp the system will try to move me to my preferred aisle seat and probably force me back into 25E or some such...

Sadly, AA has no way to lock my "travel agent" out of my record. Sadly, there is no preference I can set in Rearden that says "I prefer you LEAVE MY GODDAMN SEAT ASSIGNMENT ALONE". :(

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