aurigny sets date of birth to 1970-01-01, the start of the Unix epoch, every time, for known customers

Airlines are generally obsessed with making customers enter, and re-enter, information that the airline already has.  They would probably appeal to regulation as an excuse.  But since each airline requires different information to be re-entered, a more plausible explanation would be incompetence, as well as stupidity.

The current Aurigny web site was formed chaotically some time in the last year.  The more I hear about this, the worse it sounds.  They had to rush in a different booking system after falling out with a supplier.  As a customer, I experienced forced password resets, because they failed to migrate their customer password database, and the password resets for a time did not work, rendering my account broken.  Apparently, during the period soon after the migration, customers were turning up at the airport ready to fly, and the airline had no record of their booking.  Not for all customers, but for some.

The booking web site, as it stands, makes the known customer re-enter their date of birth every time they make a booking.  At the risk of stating something extremely obvious, the date of birth of a person does not change over time.  The default value in their web form is 1970-01-01, depicted above.  Techies will know that Unix time is measured in seconds since 1970-01-01.  So whenever an incorrect date value of 1970-01-01 comes up, one knows that something horrific is happening.

I have no idea what the data path is to the 1970-01-01.  A tracing-thru of it would probably make for an entertaining thedailywtf article.  Perhaps it starts as an SQL null, gets implicitly cast to a zero, and then date-ified.  Who knows!  Probably no one at Aurigny knows, either.

I hadn't looked at thedailywtf for years, so I just checked their web site, and the most recent article, at the top, happens to be about an airline's crap web site:

Meanwhile, as I wrote this article, the thing timed out, and took me back to front page.  I had to re-enter, from scratch, all the information, including departure airport and destination, date of flight, and that it's one-way.  You don't need to time this out after a few minutes.  You can just handle it if some of the information has become stale when the customer next submits the form.  If you really have to time it out, then, and here is radical idea, but apparently it's possible if you have real wizards, have the form's fields set to THE PREVIOUS VALUES THE CUSTOMER JUST SET BEFORE, because that's probably what they want to search for again now that it's timed out.

Setting the date of birth is an ordeal in itself.  Since the field said "01-Jan-1970", the hope was that one could type in a date in the same format.  No.  It's a calendar widget, and requires extensive interaction to set.  Clicking on the field brings up the widget.  One still can't type the year.  To select the year, one clicks on the drop-down.  My year, 1979, is not visible in the list that drops down, so I had to scroll it in order to find 1979.  Then, to change the month from January to September, I had to click on he month arrow 8 times.  Finally, I clicked on the day, and "Close".

 

Even in the most bureaucratic paper-based bureaucracies that have ever existed, I suspect it was possible to give one's date of birth by simply writing it in a field, or perhaps in three fields, one each for year, month, day.  Rather than doing battle with some geek's idea of a date-picking machine, expending one to two orders of magnitude more time and cognitive load.

After "agreeing" to Terms and Conditions (again, why "agree" every time, is there no customer relationship here?), the prospective passenger has to guess that the blank rectangle towards the bottom-right might be some kind of "next" button.  No, it's not a one-off glitch; I remember this "next" button being blank the last several times I've used the web site.

The booking seems to happen, which is nice, and I realise I should add some bags.  I go to the "manage [..] booking" page, which is suffering from a your-my perspective schism:

For a "manage booking" page, there is remarkably little management of bookings possible. Nothing is clickable, and I see no mention of adding bags, for example. [Ah, I found it, it's in "book extras" at the top. It gives the impression that the top bar has account scope, not scoped to the particular flight, but perhaps it's only ever a single flight on this page.  You don't get here by logging in to your account, but by entering flight details]

I then logged in from the front page.  This turns out to be a "frequent flyer" thing, and is retrospective.  There appears to be no view of upcoming flights for the customer.  Flights must be managed transactionally by looking up one single booking at a time by booking reference and surname, not by logging in and looking at upcoming flights, a view which doesn't currently seem to exist.