Well, I give them respect for trying something new. It has some improvements, but the UX falls short in others.
1. Boarding pass is great.
2. Being able to scroll back up to make changes is wonderful. A lot of airline sites are slow, your session breaks when you use the back button, etc. It's nice being able to scroll up, change a date, scroll back down. Well done.
As for the downside, it uses way too much space. This might work on a tablet or touch screen, but it's awful for the desktop. For example, your typical airline uses something like this...
A couple of autocomplete boxes, and a calendar picker that pops up. Works fine, it's all visible in a little box, and easy to use. The virgin site stretches this across a handful of pages, or if you're picking further off dates, it might be 10+ pages. That's just bad design.
What they should do is keep a more traditional method of selecting all your airports and dates, then scroll down to the prices when you click continue. I think it would be the best of both worlds.
They also need a method of finding the best price over a given time period. Jetstar is one of my favorites when it comes to this...
Pick a flight, say Brisbane to Sydney for a few weeks in June. Click the box to say you want the lowest price. It gives you a nice little graph with all the cheapest flights highlighted, so you can easily choose your days. Actually, the whole Jetstar booking process is decent, and I used it often in Australia.
1. Boarding pass is great.
2. Being able to scroll back up to make changes is wonderful. A lot of airline sites are slow, your session breaks when you use the back button, etc. It's nice being able to scroll up, change a date, scroll back down. Well done.
As for the downside, it uses way too much space. This might work on a tablet or touch screen, but it's awful for the desktop. For example, your typical airline uses something like this...
http://i.imgur.com/bEjWWm0.png
A couple of autocomplete boxes, and a calendar picker that pops up. Works fine, it's all visible in a little box, and easy to use. The virgin site stretches this across a handful of pages, or if you're picking further off dates, it might be 10+ pages. That's just bad design.
What they should do is keep a more traditional method of selecting all your airports and dates, then scroll down to the prices when you click continue. I think it would be the best of both worlds.
They also need a method of finding the best price over a given time period. Jetstar is one of my favorites when it comes to this...
http://booknow.jetstar.com/Search.aspx
Pick a flight, say Brisbane to Sydney for a few weeks in June. Click the box to say you want the lowest price. It gives you a nice little graph with all the cheapest flights highlighted, so you can easily choose your days. Actually, the whole Jetstar booking process is decent, and I used it often in Australia.