Air Malta – new website
Air Malta has carried out a long overdue overhaul of its website at www.airmalta.com. Overall, I think they have done a good job.
It’s worth a visit – the design and navigation is much slicker. No doubt additional features/issues will manifest in the next few days, but first impressions are very positive.
In addition to a much more attractive and modern website (there are some great background photos on it), updated features include:
– Personal log-in to the site, with an opportunity to fully update your details/preferences. This also automatically logs you in to Flypass too.
– A much easier to navigate, and better presented, Flypass section.
– Clear links to a “special offers” page.
– “Highlighted offers”, showing a range of special offers currently available.
– A neat summary in the “My Account” section of your booked (and past) flights.
– Better promotion of the previously hidden “Boarding Pass benefits”. (No additional offers as yet though, since my post highlighting this offer, although by Air Malta’s own admission “This service was introduced in late 2012, so we’re still adding partner businesses“)
– Connections to facebook/twitter/youtube.
– More information on what’s going on in Malta generally.
You can also subscribe to the “Air Malta newsletter”. At the risk of sounding cynical I will wait until I receive one of these before I actually conclude that it exists, but subscription to a list is a step in the right direction.
The Flypass award booking system remains by phone and email. This isn’t a surprise – we are waiting on the overhaul of Flypass (later this year) for online award booking to be implemented.
If I’m going to be negative, it strikes me as very lazy that, on launch of the updated website, the headline “latest news” item is Air Malta’s expired Christmas sale promotion. It took me three seconds to spot that, and it’s this kind of lack of attention to detail that remains my main concern with Air Malta and the Flypass scheme. Fingers crossed it was an oversight in the rush to get the new website launched, and hopefully latest news will in fact be that before long.
If you have any feedback on/issues with the new site that warrants highlighting or further investigation, I would be very grateful if you could email me at maltapoints@gmail.com and I will post on it, or take it up with Air Malta. Please remember that I am fully independent of Air Malta.
I find the new site to be a bit clunky. Too much emphasis seems to be spent on scrolling the big, impressive pictures of Valletta, the Blue Grotto etc., that it makes the responsiveness of the web site to be excrutiatingly slow. I’ve tried on an iPad (safari), a Mac (Safari, Chrome) and a PC (Chrome, IE9, IE7).
I’ve been trying to take advantage of the 20% off deal (today only), and found that various pieces of screen furniture are missing or inoperable.
…but the pictures are nice.
Interesting comments. I have been using the new site fairly regularly since launch and tend to agree – I was trying to book a flight yesterday and it became a little frustrating. Perhaps not “excruciatingly slow”, but certainly not as responsive as it should be.
I am in contact with the Air Malta web designer, who is very keen to receive all feedback, and am compiling a list of issues.
As a general comment, what encourages me about the website is that it’s clearly an attempt to take Air Malta out of the 1980s, but if that’s at the expense of ease-of-use, and the speed of the booking interface, then clearly work needs to be done.
I am also interested in your reference to a “20% off” deal for yesterday only – that was unknown to both me and my Air Malta contacts – can you elaborate?