Category Archives: Air Travel

Southwest Airlines Adds Mobile Booking and Flight Status

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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 … Continue reading →

Mobile Sites For Pilots

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A reader tipped me about a couple of good mobile web sites of interest to pilots and air travelers. Thanks, Mike. AeroPlanner is a flight planning tool for pilots. Registration at aeroplanner.com is required before you can use the mobile site. There are various levels of membership from free to $250/year. Even the free membership includes full access to the mobile site which has charts, flight plan viewing, detailed aviation weather reports, aviation calculators and a comprehensive directory of airports … Continue reading →

Northwest Airlines’ “Full” Mobile Site

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US air carrier Northwest Airlines has rolled out a new mobile site that includes virtually all the functionality of their desktop web site. The new site (mobile.nwa.com) supplements rather than replaces the airline’s existing and more limited mobile site at wireless.nwa.com. 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 … Continue reading →

FlightStats.com – International Flight Tracking

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FlightStats.com has a new mobile flight tracking service that covers international as well as domestic flights. According to their website FlightStats aggregates information from airlines, airports and government agencies around the world to provide the most complete possible flight status information. FlightStats seems to deliver what they claim, giving me estimated flight arrival information for en route flights in the US and Europe including domestic Russian flights. Data seems scarcer for some parts of the world. For flights within China … Continue reading →

Kayak Mobile

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Kayak.com is a relatively new travel meta-search engine which searches over 120 travel sites including all the major airline sites except Southwest, many hotel chain sites as well as travel booking sites like Orbitz and CheapTickets. It includes a lot of sites you might not think of searching like AsiaRooms.com or Wegolo.com which specializes in European budget airlines. Kayak is purely a search engine like Google – it doesn’t do bookings. You search for the lowest fare or for a … Continue reading →

Orbitz Mobile

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Justin over at MOpocket mentioned that online travel giant Orbiz has launched a mobile site and added ” I hope WAP Review guy does a review of it”. I’m happy to oblige, so here goes. According to Alexa, Orbitz.com is the number two (in web traffic) online travel agency behind Expedia. In terms of mobile web adoption Orbitz also trails Expedia whose UK operation has had a wml-only Web site for several years. The new Orbitz site is much nicer … Continue reading →

Mobile Web (un)Usability

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My fellow mobilist and host of this weeks Carnival of the Mobilists, Daniel Taylor at Mobile Enterprise Weblog has posted an interesting piece on mobile web usability or lack there of. Daniel’s article, Who Designs This Stuff? describes the difficulties and frustrations that he experienced trying to accomplish something on the mobile web that should have been easy – getting the arrival time of a airline flight. The problems Daniel experienced are typical of the frustration that many users experience … Continue reading →

Mobile SeatGuru.com

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SeatGuru.com now has a mobile site. Thanks to Kevin Tofel at James Kendrick’s jkOnTheRun.com for discovering this site and sharing it. SeatGuru, which has been on the full web for five years, tells travelers something they never know enough about until too late – airline seats. The site has tables comparing seat width and pitch and in-flight amenities for all the aircraft types in the fleets of 29 airlines. The best part of SeatGuru are the detailed seating charts which … Continue reading →