Before heading to the airport yesterday to retrieve my husband from the wilds of Memorial Day travel mayhem, I checked his flight’s status on United.com and found something I hadn’t noticed before. When you check flight status online, United now displays the reason for a flight’s delay or any changes in schedule along with the estimated arrival time, baggage claim and terminal information. I’m not sure how long the airline has been doing this, but I hadn’t seen this level of detail at the flight status stage before - and it’s certainly not a feature on every airline web site.

While learning that his flight’s delayed departure happened because the airline needed more time to service the aircraft was far from an earth-shattering revelation, I did appreciate the added level of transparency there. And over time, the collection and documentation of delay details like this could certainly aid travelers and help them as they decide which flights are most likely to be on time.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 at 1:56 pm and is filed under Air Travel, Travel Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.