Wap Review

Low cost airline's  mobile site lets you book a flight, view your bookings, do online check-ins and check flight status. Based in Malaysia, AirAsia flies throughout Asia and to Australia and the UK.

Timetable, Flight Status, Frequent Flyer Balance. Set up email SMS or pager notiication of delays for a specific flight.

British Airways redesiged mobile site offers real-time arrival and departure information and mobile flight check in..

Spanish airline's mobile site has schedules,arrivals and departures, online check-in and mobile boarding passes using QR codes.  Nice site but the browser detection is seriously broken with many mobiles getting either the full site or an error message. It's OK in Opera Mini.  Source: Mobility.mobi

Jetstar Airways is a discount airline serving Australia, Asia and Hawaii.  There mobile site provides fares, real time arrival and departure information and schedules. It also offers something I haven't seen before, passengers can change reservations using the mobile site. Source: GoMo News

Malaysia Airlines' new mobile site offers booking, check in, flight status, timetables, click to call contact numbers and something I haven't seen before on a mobile airline site, lost luggage tracking. Source: Travel Blackboard via Mobility.mobi

The new site really does include all the functionality of the desktop web site. You can book flights - including award travel, enroll in the frequent flier program, do online check-in and even browse Northwest's Investor Relations page!

Mobile.nwa.com was developed by Usablenet, well known for it's tools for making web sites accessible to persons with disabilities. There's a lot of overlap in the requirements in making a site accessible, and making it mobile friendly. Both need to emphasize text over images, put main content first and have simple, intuitive navigation. Useablenet describes their technology as transcoding but it's clearly different than the totally automatic mobile transcoding done by Skweezer or Google. There seems to be some sort of custom mapping used in adapting Northwest's web site to mobile. Images on the web site are not resized, rather a completely different set of fewer and small images are used. The navigational menus are organized differently in the mobile site and some of the link text is changed slightly. The end result is a site that includes all the content of the desktop site in a generally mobile friendly format.

I was a little surprised that Useablenet didn't use accesskeys in their design as they add greatly to usability with phone browsers that lack a pointing device. Device support is somewhat limited, Useablenet's web site indicates that their solution adapts content to fit the limitations of different mobile browsers, even wml-only one. I guess that's an optional feature that Northwest didn't choose to implement as the site sends xhtml-mp to the wml-only Nokia 3510i emulator and gave out of memory errors on some pages like Flight Search using the the Openwave V7 browser on my Motorola i855. Opera Mini on the same phone handled all the pages I tried with no issue. Blackberries, Smartphones and modern mainstream phones with more capable browser like NetFront or Nokia's browser should be able to use the site.

Northwest's is not the first or only site to have gotten the Usablenet treatment. Amtrak Mobile is also powered by Useablenet. Other's I've found are mobile.delta.com and sites for Hilton Garden Inns and 1-800-Flowers.com.

Arrival and departure times, flight schedules, Mabuhay Miles information, news,  promotions, ticket office addresses and phone numbers which are NOT click to call enabled!!  Source Mobility.mobi

Mobile site of S7, Russia's largest domestic airline lets you view flight status and schedules, make reservations, buy tickets and check in online. Choice of Russian, English or German user interfaces.

South African Airways (SAA) new mobile site has schedules, directions to airport lounges, live flight arrival and departure information, a currency converter and weather forecasts for arrival cities. Source: Mobility.mobi

One of my readers suggested I take a look at Southwest Airline's new mobile site.  Back in 2006, Southwest was one of the first airlines to offer mobile web based online check in.  Until recently however, check in was about the only thing you could do on the Southwest site.

That's all changed with the latest redesign. The new Southwest site not only lets you check in but also offers mobile users a full range of online services including flight booking using a credit card, checking flight status and interactive schedules. Members of Rapid Rewards, Southwest's frequent flier program, can  login to their MySouthwest account.using their mobile device to view scheduled trips and check their rewards status.

Online check in works as before and is quite easy. You enter your flight confirmation number and name and that's it, you're checked in. You do still need to stop at en eTicket kiosk at the airport to print your boarding pass.

In this regard Southwest is a bit behind the curve as several airlines including American, Continental, Lufthansa, SAS and Air Canada are now sending electronic boarding passes encoded as Bar Coded Boarding Pass (BCBP) 2D barcodes to mobile users who can simply scan their phone screens at the security checkpoint and gate. With BCBP scanners scheduled to be rolled out to security checkpoints at all US airports next year I'm hoping the Southwest will be quick to adopt this time saving technology too.

The new site has two variants.  There is a slick iPhone specific one and a more generic mobile view for other devices.  The two versions, which are served from the same URL have exactlly the same functionality, differing only in their level of eye candy. I'm running Cyanogen's 4.0.4 ROM on my Google Ion Android phone which has a modified browser  that lets you change the user agent header to impersonate an iPhone.  The iPhone version of the Southwest site seems to work perfectly in the Android browser, although users of un-modified Android phones will not see it. I wish more web designers would wake up to the fact that the rendering and CSS and JavaScript support of the Android browser is almost identical to that of the iPhone and that most iPhone web apps will work well and look good on Android phones.

Flight schedules, live arrival information, baggage tracking, special promotions and information about the cites TAP Portugal serves including weather, attractions, restaurants, hotels and shopping. Source Oh! Mobile Directory

Swiss International Airlines' very comprehensive mobile site has timetables, real-time arrival and departure information, booking using your stored credit card number or entering new CC details, frequent flyer status, world wide click to call phone numbers and free airliner wallpaper downloads. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

Australian-based Virgin Blue operates between Australian and international destinations in the South Pacific and Southeast Asia. The airline's mobile site offers flight booking, booking changes online and online check in using a 2D bar code boarding pass delivered to the phone.

Online schedules, seat availability and click to call contact numbers for Barcelona based Vueling Airlines, a low cost airline offering cheap flights among European capitals. The site has invalid markup that will prevent it from working in some browsers and is quite slow.

Mobile online check in for Canada's WestJet.  Source: Anything Geospatial via Mobility.mobi