Alaska Airlines 4+

As a seasoned traveler with over a million miles flown on the major domestic & international airlines, and as a veteran s/w tech entrepreneur, I haven’t had any ‘great’ experiences with airlines’ online apps to date... until today. Since early 2019 & throughout the pandemic this year, I have flown (safely) on a dozen+ flights with Alaska Air. And I have used the Alaska Air web-based & smartphone-based apps, as well as worked with your customer service teams by phone & via chat over the last 18+ months. I’ve keenly observed the iterative improvement process of your apps with consistent upgrades & added useful U/I ‘user interface’ enhancements. My online experience today was, frankly, flawless. I booked a business flight to Mexico with the smartphone app. My experience with the app was efficient, rapid, & completed with no hang-ups or ‘dropped session’ or ‘system reboot’ glitches. In fact, the booking of the round trip flight, start-to-finish, was just a couple of minutes... literally like two minutes. As I said, flawless. Kudos to your IT App Dev team. Thanks for your efforts in creating a great customer experience! And keep working toward making the Alaska Air online experience even better. It is so great to see that your company-wide focus on great customer service is paying off. Ya know... the sky’s the limit! JY-Burlingame, CA

I have traveled on Alaska twice this year. The planes are old and worn out. Customer service is wonderful but the poor representatives can only deal with the info they have been given as ALASKA does not get them out into the planes so they can see what is really happening. The wait is hours to speak to customer service but they do call back within the time given which has been as much as 10 hours. Alaska does little to make one comfortable on a flight. No screens in the seat back so you have to figure out how to use your phone to enjoy a movie and hope you have that feature. The carts do not start by until at least 45 minutes to an hour into the flight. The over heads are small and always full. The alcohol is low quality (had to send back drinks as the mix was not worth the calories), on the website so many items are inaccurate or are not available especially no info on food - even on flights of several hours, (info on food in first class is especially lacking). Due to so many comfort items over looked by Alaska and their cost cutting in maintenance dating back to the jack screw fiasco that killed over hundred passengers, trusting this airline is still impossible. Other airlines are never perfect but at least they are more comfortable, websites easier to navigate, contain more info, and customer service is more accurate. If you can try another carrier you will probably enjoy it more.

I wish your app had the option to book a new flight when a flight gets canceled. I would also love to see digital options for obtaining hotel and meal vouchers when this happens. In this day and age, I feel it is archaic to have to stand in a line for several hours to get what I need. I love this airline and I want it to thrive. I would love to see app technology upgrades to all airlines. I will say that I do appreciate Ak Airlines for granting hotel and meal vouchers for my 2 canceled flights. My husband and I did have to fly into Dallas at one point and drive to get to Austin and we had to pay for that rental car. I would love it if a rental car could be an option that is covered when a flight gets canceled as well. This trip cost us a lot more than we were planing and the wait times to get help was insane. I could see the representatives were scrambling and visibly stressed out trying to assist everyone in the same predicament. They deserve a lot of kudos for doing what they could to help. We tried to resolve our issues online while waiting in line, but we’re told a representative would text us back in 50 mins or so each time. If there were options to pick a new flight, get vouchers and a rental car, that would have been incredible. Thank you for listening! I hope my input will incite some ideas for improvements for the future!