There are many sites out there who rank airlines by service or percentage of on-time arrivals, this however is not one of those sites. Half Nut Development reviews their web sites. For many it’s the first interaction with an airline and you know what they say about first impressions. This is the chance to make their sites easy to use and gain a repeat customer or conversely frustrate a user so much that they leave the site. We’ve seen many of each of these type of sites and have ranked them accordingly.

We review sites on usability, accessibility, compliance with web development standards and much much more. The purpose is to let the airlines themselves as well as their patrons know just how they are doing in the battle to maintain a corporate level web site. This is no trivial task and that makes it that much more impressive for airlines who are meeting or exceeding expectations.

Check out the reviews now!

If you are from an airline and would like your site reviewed just let us know and we’ll give you an honest and fair evaluation. Who knows, you could be like one of the airlines in the August Review of best overall front-page.

• Avior Airlines -Review
• Firefly Airlines -Review
• Fly Thomas Cook -Review

I did a quick analysis of some Asian Pacific Airline websites this morning and found that you definitely get what you pay for. Some of the smaller airlines look like they didn’t get a development staff who were quite up to snuff on modern ways to develop web pages. Their image content is way out of control and their markup could definitely use some optimization.

Take a look at these and you decide which ones are corporate level and which ones need some assistance.

http://www.mandalaair.com/
http://www.pacificairlines.com.vn/
http://www.airasia.com/site/my/en/home.jsp
http://www.jetstar.com/au/index.html

Lo and behold I was reading through my inbox today and there was an message about speed monitoring of airline web sites. Take a look at the rankings from Gomez.

AirTran and jetBlue are the top two fastest web sites in North America. Congrats go out to Navitaire and both these airlines.

It seems more and more anilines are trying to make up for lost revenue by hawking their wares to their captive audiences. I hope this trend is one that is carried out as unobtrusively as possible. After all, who would like to be wedged in the middle seat in coach and being pestered to buy some discount cologne? I think I’ll invent a no soliciting sign that can be attached directly overhead to let the attendants know that I wouldn’t care to be disturbed for their sales presentations. Now I know it’s not their faults, but lets just hope they can carry this off in a fashion similar to SkyMall where I’m not obliged to listen to a speech about a five dollar bag of Doritos or a time share in Las Vegas.

Having spread sunshine about the possibilities I think airlines can carry this off if they do it right.
I just read a story of Skybus airlines passengers who flew for $10 but spent 10 times that in buying gifts on their way to see their grandchildren. This can be a win win situation for airlines and passengers to get great discounts on products and services if they desire.

Lets just hope the skies don’t become the new showroom for used car salesmen.

Airbus warns that more runways are needed
Britain will be third-largest customer for new planes
February 8 (The Guardian) - Airbus entered the debate over airport expansion yesterday by warning that more runways are needed to accommodate a doubling of the global aircraft fleet by 2026.

Check out http://www.xl.com/.

The airline’s initial fee for tickets to either Monterrey or Cancun start at $9.99, with $45 to $55 added for additional fees and taxes.
In order to offer these reduced fares, VivaAerobus CEO Mike Szucs said the company had to make several sacrifices: All on-flight meals will cost extra, there are no ticket refunds.