Itinerary Incompetence

Recently I booked a trip online. I briefly glanced through the confirmation email to - erm - confirm that everything was correct, which it seemed to be. Some weeks later I received another confirmation of my itinerary, and then a week later another one. This finally caught my attention and so I looked at this third itinerary more closely.

This closer inspection turned out to be important, for the itinerary was rather screwed up. It had me on two different flights for each leg of my trip, and one flight for each leg had a travel time of zero hours and a travel distance of zero miles. Additionally, the end of the itinerary included some twenty "Placeholder comment" comments.

Over the next two weeks I received three more of these.

Finally I called my travel agent to find out what was going on. It was a good thing I did, because it turns out my airline had canceled my original flights and rescheduled me on different flights that left some five hours earlier! If I hadn't noticed all this and had arrived at the airport based on the original schedule I would have been pretty grumpy with myself!

Evidently the drastic reschedule completely befuddled my travel agent's itinerary-generating software. Bad them. Airlines reschedule flights all the time - usually changing times by just a few minutes - so my receiving a flurry of updated itineraries was not out of the ordinary. I did review each update, but because I wasn't expecting much of a change my review was only cursory. Bad me.

Moral: When you're dreaming up test cases, remember to think waaaaaay out of the box. An airline replacing a flight with one half a day earlier wouldn't have been the first test case that would have come to my mind. But clearly it happens.

Moral: Strings like "Placeholder comment" probably don't belong anywhere in your production system. Checking for strings like this is easily automated, but some manual poking around is good too. I mean, would you think to include "Well, that was a dumb thing to do, stupid user you" in your list of Strings That Shouldn't Make It Into Production? (It did, true story. The customer was not amused.)

Moral: When your travel agent sends you a new itinerary, review it verrry carefully! <g/>

Posted by The Braidy Tester at 07:30 AM  Permalink