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How Website Usability Cost Me $634

Because every JavaScript calendar is different, I didn’t notice that I booked my return flight for the wrong date. Fixing this has turned out to be rather expensive.

I’m supposed to return from Hawai’i on Sunday, February 26th. Unfortunately, my flight is actually booked for Sunday, March 26th. Oops.

I’m a website designer with a deep appreciation for usability and standards. This has driven home how much I really hate that every travel site has their own unique version of a JavaScript pop-up calendar.

Each calendar looks and behaves differently. Each has a different UI for choosing days and months. Each will appear and disappear with different rules. I used a half-dozen of them on different travel and airline flights when booking my flight in January, and was jumping between a lot of browser tabs in the process.

The particular site I ended up using (I’m not going to bother to even name them here) had a great feature: its calendar shows two months at a time when it pops up. The user makes one less click when choosing a date in the succeeding month. Good idea, right?

In my case it was an awful, terrible, no good, very bad idea. It also changes the two displayed months when choosing a return date. I didn’t see that change.

Here’s the scenario: I’m booking my flight in January. I pick my departure date and it shows calendars for January and February. I choose my departure date in February, on the second calear.

I pick my return date. Unbeknownst to me, the calendar now shows February and March. (Because clearly I will not choose a return date in January, right?) But I click my return date in the second month shown, without really reading it.

Oops.

Fixing that mistake cost me the fare difference plus a $100 / person change fee. My total: $634.00.

As luck would have it, a mistake like this can only happen in January of non-leap years. (I guess they didn’t check that in usability testing.) Because February is the only month with 28 days, January is the only month where the calendars will change and my departing date falls on the same day two months in a row: Sunday.

Yes, I could have reviewed the departure time more carefully. And from here on out I will. But I’m not going to book a flight through that website ever again. My mistake, sure. But one I didn’t need to make.

(And the alternative of making my one-week vacation a five-week vacation is tempting, but I actually want to keep my job so I can travel to other places later on. But I did consider it, briefly.)