[Anonymous]

[Bucksnet]

BA are testing a new booking interface on their website. The layout is much better and you skip the date selection screen. You can also see economy and CE fares at the same time. However, the only routes I have seen it on are LHR to BRU, HAM and WAW.

Has anyone else seen this yet and what are your thoughts?

[BGIWorldTraveller]

I made a post about this a month ago, when booking LGW-NAP it appeared. I love it!

[JordanD]

It’s a great shame that BA didn’t take the opportunity to use the excellent East Coast trains “MixingDeck” Booking interface – it shows clearly all the price bands, all the trains they are active on and actively allows you to mix and match trains. (It should be said that East Coast inherited it from National Express who in got it from GNER).

Others should sit up and take note.

[NTarrant]

I like the new style, it has been used for a while as BGIWorldtraveller says. Useful if you want to mix classes for different legs.

Southern also use the “MixingDeck” system which is a good way of seeing all of the prices and fares at different times.

[Bucksnet]

I’ve just noticed this on Moscow as well.

Does anyone else know of any other routes?

[VintageKrug]

It’s not route specific; depends when you log on, which browser you’re using etc.

You can still mix and match classes using the current interface, as well as being offered increased flexibility prior to the payment page, without being presented with a plethora of confusing options.

I’ve only seen the new interface once, but I like it!

[Bucksnet]

I’ve just tried booking GOT and the new booking screen came up. It showed CE at a lower price than economy, something I’ve not seen before.

No guesses which one I picked.

[continentalclub]

It’s not in fact uncommon to find the most inflexible CE ticket to be cheaper than the last remaining flexible ET tickets on busy flights.

For those who have not yet chanced across the new interface, I’ve saved a screenshot here:

http://bit.ly/novBJG

Note that the cabin descriptions ‘Euro Traveller’ and ‘Club Europe’ have been replaced by Economy and Business Class.

Personally, although it looks more contemporary than the current interface, I will reserve judgment until I see how it copes with the connecting itineraries and codeshare options that produce the endless pages of (often irrelevant and unpriced) results when using the existing system.

[Bucksnet]

I hate getting those screens, you have to pick flights times but prices are not shown until the end.

[continentalclub]

Absolutely, Bucksnet! It was arguably not a problem when ba.com was fairly restricted to selling only BA itineraries, but now with IB and AA, making partner flights on all sorts of airlines available and codeshares on the likes of flybe, the presentation of the myriad options is just not up to the job.

As an example of the type, NCL-SAN is a good one:

http://tidd.ly/f690d731

At the moment, the cheapest and shortest routing outbound and return is two thirds of the way down each listing. Thankfully, the flybe codeshares into LGW (which depart NCL earlier than the LHR so showed up first even though they required an airport change and were longer) seem to have been suppressed.

At least the prices show up in this example though; if you changed the inbound flight to return from LAX then you’d be searching blind.

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