America
West Airlines
www.americawest.com
Site Features:
Flight Schedule, Frequent Flier Loyalty Programs, Information on
Hot Fares, Hotels from Placestostay.com, Cars from Cendant and Vacations
from AmericaWest Vacations, Links, Contests
Site Report:
Of all of the major airlines, AmericaWest patterns itself most after the low fare carriers. It runs mostly point to point fares, but it folds in services like first class cabins, assigned seats, frequent flier programs and flights out of larger airports. 13,000 employees, led by Doug Parker, are out to make flying America West Airlines your choice. It's a heady goal, but America West is built differently than some of the other larger carriers like American and Delta. They've learned from the upstarts like Southwest and JetBlue and they've shaved cost in order to carve out a profitable niche.
America West is the only airline that Travelsites
knows of that has designed a "Customers First Plan" to complements its
contract of carriage (fyi -- the contract of carriage is the legal document that you sign up for as a passenger,
if you look, you'll see the terms and conditions of it on your
ticket).
The America West Customers First Plan is intended to provide
the customer with information regarding America West's policies,
procedures and methods. This means America West has some stake in
the game when you decide to fly them -- which should make you feel
pretty good.
Certainly the fares to markets like Phoenix and Las Vegas are compelling, especially from east coast cities. But is the web site one that the Travelsites Editors can recommend? Frankly, no. Americawest.com is not the prettiest of sites. Yes, it has all the major functionality of all the bigger airlines' offerings, but it's just executed poorly. The colors of this carrier aren't the most understated and that certainly adds to the effect. But the main problem is that the homepage of this site is just cluttered.
Web Check in and the site's supposed main focus (taking your booking) are dwarfed by the text links that take up at least 40% of the site. The amount of words is pretty staggering... and it's just not what you want to see on the front page of a site. AmericaWest does try to merchandise a bit with the Current Fare Specials area, but it's swallowed by the rest of the text underneath it. An easy way to fix this would be to iconize the areas.
America West does provide some interesting content links to their destination cities. In fact, Travelsites.com wishes they'd link to us!
But overall, we see the potential for much improvement at AmericaWest.com. Yes, they've got good fares, and yes you should use them. But perhaps they could make the experience a bit easier on the eyes.
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