Some businesses just don’t ‘get’ the iPhone

Some efforts to be mobile-content friendly are already a dismal failure. What were they thinking? CHRIS THOMAS

By Chris Thomas

A couple of weeks ago, I was up at the Gold Coast for my brother’s 40th. For me, it was a whirlwind trip – and, like most interstate travellers, I went through the usual booking process, jumped online, compared a few prices, checked out the schedules and ended up booking the flight up and back with Jetstar.

My flight home was on Saturday afternoon, departing Gold Coast Airport. But there was one small snag. I got up really late (with obligatory hangover), waited ages for a taxi, and missed the flight check-in by three miserable minutes.

Despite my profuse apologising, the check-in attendant wouldn’t budge. As I walked away in a huff, he helpfully offered that there was another flight in a couple of hours time. I called back that I was probably going to book a flight home with another airline.

Bad day.

So I bought a coffee, sat down, and called my partner to let her know that I was going to be a little late home – with another apology attached.

So while I was sitting there with my cuppa, it suddenly dawned on me that I could book a flight with my iPhone. So (trying hard not to look like a complete tool), I discretely looked up Virgin’s website. Cool, they had a flight in an hour’s time and it was cheap. Just in case, I thought I’d better also check Jetstar’s offering.

But instead of going to Jetstar’s normal website, they had (in their infinite wisdom) decided to create a new site solely dedicated to iPhone users.

And it’s hopeless…

You can’t book a flight. You have to download a 180kb PDF to see their flight schedules. You have to call them to hear about their special deals!

So Virgin got the guernsey that Saturday afternoon. I booked the flight, saved the receipt and grabbed a booking pass in under five minutes.

Jetstar, please don’t try and fix something that’s not broken.

Chris Thomas heads Reseo, a search engine optimisation company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.

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