befly.com

Review by Adrian Mann, owner of Adrian Mann Design, providing independent reviews and analysis of travel web sites in the UK.

It can’t have escaped your notice that British European Airways are advertising their new website, flybe.com. Founded in 1979 as Jersey European, they have continued to expand their fleet and services, changed their name to British European, and are now the UK’s third-largest scheduled airline.

Overall
The first thing to note is that it’s a frames site – the top frame contains the usual navigation bar, with the bottom, larger frame containing the content. The booking engine, however, is single pages at a different address. It’s a nice looking site, and carries the branding throughout consistently, but some pages seem to have rather a lot of empty space.

Content
The most important function of the site has to be the online booking. This is a five-stage process, and has a progress indicator so you know which stage you’re at. In common with many other online booking engines, it’s a matter of selecting your departure airport and destination, date of travel and number of passengers. The available destinations change depending on where you fly from, and the date can be selected by using drop-down menus or a calendar, although it will allow selection of dates in the past. There is then a choice of fare – business/premium economy, flexible fares or lowest available. Next, you select the times you wish to travel, and then the fare is calculated. The price is shown in Pounds for flights originating in the UK, or Euro for those starting elsewhere in Europe. Once you’re happy with the selection, it’s on to the payment page.
The process has links to helpful pages along the way, but it’s here some problems occur. For instance, if you want more details on the three types of fares, instead of the expected information there’s a ‘404 – page not found’ error. On the home page, there’s a link to find out more about the permanently low fares. This page has a button to take you to the online booking, but again the page is missing – simply because the address for the link is wrong (“bokbe” rather than “bookbe”). It doesn’t take many errors for the confidence of the average user to evaporate – if they aren’t looking after the simple things, how do you feel about giving them your credit card details?
The convention in web site design is that the company logo should also function as a link back to the home page, and indeed it does, apart from when you’re using the booking engine. They also make heavy use of pop-up windows, for items such as Conditions of Carriage, Help, and Passenger Information & Policies – oops – another “404 Page not found” error.
Another curious feature is the link to the timetable. Click on the link, and you get the timetable, right? Well, no – instead, there’s a form with 24 boxes and buttons for you to fill in, just to request a timetable. Do they need to know my marital status and occupation in order for me to see their timetable? This looks suspiciously like a data-gathering exercise. However, fill in all the boxes and request the timetable, and you’re informed that a timetable is on its way. How? By email? By post? When will it arrive?
There’s plenty of other information and links available on the site, such as their Frequent Flyer programme, airport information, health advice, weather – all the usual airline site fare. However, the link to the Short Breaks is broken. There’s also a newsletter, company information and an opportunity to give some feedback.

Summary
I really wanted to like this site, and in the main I do. But the missing pages, pop-up windows and other minor niggles really take the shine off it. I tried the site over a few days to make sure I hadn’t caught it on a bad day, but the errors persisted. One would think if they’ve invested all that time and money in producing and then advertising the site, they would have tested it more thoroughly, and implemented a method of continually monitoring it in order to catch and fix the problems.
Even if the problems were purely temporary, I’m afraid it’s not good enough – given the market they operate in and the current business climate, being “good enough” or providing excuses simply won’t do.