Booking engines that have driven me to the brink of madness (featuring Air Seoul)

For reasons that will become apparent in a few weeks, I might be heading off east. But to do this, one needs to book tickets.

For my jumping-off point to gain a sense of how much flights cost, I fired up Google Flights and found some options.

I thought flying Air Seoul would be interesting, given it’s the low-cost affiliate of Asiana Airlines. When I priced it at the bottom end, it came to £120 return. Even if I added extra hold luggage, that would be good value for a quick two-hour hop between Seoul and Tokyo (even if I would have preferred flying between Gimpo and Haneda).

Now, this is normally an easy affair. You go to the airline’s website, enter your details, pay, and, as they say, “Job’s a goodun”. Except you have airlines like Air Seoul, and I’m actively pondering if they make any money. Why? Here’s their front page.

Air Seoul Front page, rendered in Google Chrome on macOS

It’s all very well to have Brown and Friends from Line Friends on the front page, but what happens when you try to select something simple… like selecting a departure point.

Let the pain begin. 

As the site won’t allow you to book a ticket without a departure point, the pain begins. Clicking around does no good, even using the reservations page.

Let’s try Safari. This rendered the Air Seoul site with the mobile layout. A lot lighter. Surely this will work?

Haha. Nope.

Ok. Let’s fire up Mozilla Firefox. Because I like to run different browsers, and not submit to Google’s Chromium project for everything. Brown is back once again (good), howrver can the page render correctly?

Ok. Let’s try the obvious thing at this point – can it render using Korean language? Surely that’s got to work?

Oh, for giddy aunt’s sake.

What about on a phone? They’ve mobile-optimised this site, haven’t they? This is with Safari on iOS 26 (and a protip, any browser that you get from the Apple App Store will be based on the Webkit framework – Apple do not allow other frameworks for browsers).

Looking good..

Let’s try and get some cities and…

As you can guess at this point, I’m sure you can guess I was more than done with Air Seoul at this point. I did wind up booking one of the providers on that page. You’ll find out soon enough which one that was (although that was another… less than pleasant experience)

For clarity, I’ve tested this over a mixture of platforms (including iOS, Windows and macOS), over several browsers (Chrome, Firefox and Safari) at different times and dates. The only thing I haven’t tried is a location switch with a VPN .

But you shouldn’t need to do this

In the nicest way possible, airlines should be lining up to take hard cash out of a person’s hand so they can provide air transport (boiling it down to a basic exchange – I give you money, you fly me to a city). I shouldn’t need to go to an Online Travel Agent or aggregator to book a ticket

I shouldn’t need to do this

But Air Seoul failed at the bare basics whilst I’ve been trying this for a week on and off.  And even for some of us, who have patience, or can’t make a decision… even we get tired of messing around.

If you manage to get https://flyairseoul.com/CM/en/main.do working with all the drop-downs, well done. You’ve done better than me.

But localisation and making sure resources work correctly are such a basic thing… and if you get it wrong, it costs hard cash.

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