What were they thinking?

American Airlines recently redesigned their web site, making it prettier and more in keeping with current design trends. It got less usable, at least in some areas, but it’s prettier.

I wanted to make sure that we’d gotten credit for all of our recent flying, so I went to the account page and saw that “recent activity” wasn’t a simple list any more. Instead, it’s a bunch of blocks, like so:

I saw blocks for “SFO-LHR” and “LHR-SFO”, but not for the LHR-OPO and MAD-LHR legs, so I submitted “missing flight” requests for them. But when I looked more closely, I noticed that I’d gotten significantly more mileage for the eastbound flight than the westbound. I clicked on the box for SFO-LHR and saw that it included an entry for LHR-OPO, too.

Why the box couldn’t say “SFO-LHR-OPO” is beyond me.

In contrast, the LHR-SFO box contained only that one flight, so I still need credit for Madrid to London. I looked closely at the boarding passes and discovered that the Madrid to London flight was on a different ticket than the other three legs, probably because Iberia operated that flight even though BA issued the ticket.

I love good design!