PAL revamps booking website

Once in a while, I get a pleasant surprise. Philippine Airlines (PAL) did that favor to me over the weekend, when I received an inconspicuous mail from them. To quote:

Dear Valued Philippine Airlines Customer, PAL has acquired a new internet booking engine which will soon be launched initially for domestic itineraries. Part of the preparation plans is to conduct a Market Test to help us fine tune its "look and feel". As your inputs are valuable to Philippine Airlines, you have been pre-selected to participate in the aforementioned activity which will be conducted today...

So they do listen to customers! Of course, I did not consider myself one of their valued customers. After all, I've been hitting the bad user interface of their online booking service. I promptly ignored the annoying fact that they sent me the notice on the day itself -- good thing I had access to email on that day. I was just glad to know that there has been an effort to improve PAL's lousy web interface. I was also touched that they invited me to join the test. I logged in and was elated at what I saw. Things have significantly improved and I took snapshots of the new layout. The all-important price comparisons are now presented in the early stage of the process and the lowest prices were automatically highlighted. I noticed also the scrapping of the Flash interface. Hopefully, this is what customers will be seeing starting from the soft launch of the revamped interface on 10 August 2007. PAL also graciously provided a form asking for my feedback and my only critique was that the pages were still too cluttered with text. I suggested that they use collapsible text chunks, to let users choose only the details they want to read. Thank you PAL, and I hope this will be the start of continuous improvement on your website! Coming soon: I will be posting the snapshots I took.