bmibaby.com

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

You wait ages for a new low cost flight site, and then two come along at once! This week it’s the turn of British Midland, and their new entrant into this sector – bmibaby.com.

Overall
Interesting homepage – all baby pinks and blues. Still, it looks OK, but takes an unnecessarily long 31 seconds to download on a 56kb modem. This is mainly due to two large GIF images – the ‘baby’ animation and the route map. Surely they could be reduced? The map alone is over 26kb, and in a little under a minute I was able to reduce it to under 15k with no loss of quality.

The layout is fairly conventional, with a row of links across the top, and the booking engine on the home page – right where it should be for a low cost site. The typeface used for some of the buttons could be clearer, as it makes “Submit” look more like “Cubmit”. And why are there five different typefaces used, just on the home page?

Content
The booking engine is obviously the core function of the site, and works as expected, just requiring the destination, the departure airport, travel dates and passenger numbers in order to search for flights. The current month is pre-selected by default, but it allows the selection of “UK” and “Europe” as the departure point, and then tells you off when you do. Hit the “Cubmit” button, wait a few seconds, and Oh – you’re transferred to the regular British Midland site, and all references to bmibaby are gone. The rest of the booking is completed using their regular site.

The bmibaby site has a list of special offers, flying from East Midlands Airport to nine popular European destinations, such as Nice, Malaga and Ibiza, for as little as £25. Each of the destinations on the “Offers” page has it’s own mini booking engine, which makes for a messy page crammed with buttons, drop-downs and text fields. However, the cheapest flight I could find was one-way to Dublin for £32.50, but they are having a Spring Sale, starting on Monday 8th April with fares as low as £20 one-way to Ibiza.

Still, they do have a proper timetable which is available online, unlike flybe.com (See last months review). There’s also a press page, an “About Us” page which has information on booking and baggage allowances, the option to subscribe to an email Offers newsletter, “Important Information” for terms and conditions, and a page advertising jobs with them. And that’s pretty much it.

Summary
The whole thing is a bit “flat” – the content is limited, the booking goes straight to the regular BMI site, and you’re left wondering what all the fuss was about. It all works, and there are no nasty surprises, but personally, I can’t find anything unique or memorable about it. It gives the impression that it’s been rushed out as a “Front End” selling cheap flights via the regular site.

The airline was launched on the 20th March 2002, so they’ve had time to iron out some of the wrinkles in the site, but it seems they haven’t got round to it yet. For instance, the images could easily be reduced in size to make it download faster, there’s a lack of consistency in the overall look, especially the text, the haven’t put any “Meta Tags” into the homepage (they help search engines index the page), and chunks of code appear on the “Please Wait” page from time to time. Given all the advertising that’s around for this site, I was expecting a lot more.