[freetime2]

I ran into this recently with ANA (All Nippon Airways). [1] There’s no better way to kill customer loyalty than to put someone on hold for 45 minutes on a charged phone call to make a basic change to a reservation that should be possible on the website (they also refuse to handle reservation-specific inquiries over email).

Just had a look and JAL (Japan Airlines) also doesn’t offer a FreeCall number. I haven’t had reason to call them yet though, so not sure if hold times are as bad as ANA. ANA recently redid their website and it’s a flaming pile of garbage (I could go on another whole rant here about all the ways it’s broken), which I suspect may be increasing call volumes for the past year or so.

[1] https://www.ana.co.jp/en/jp/guide/contact/international/inte...

[tetrakai]

This is bizarre! When you call ANA from Australia they have multiple dedicated 1800 (free) numbers you can reach them at, including a call centre in the Philippines for simple issues that picked up straight away for me. I wonder why they're so much more customer hostile in their own geography?

[freetime2]

In retrospect I probably should have tried making a free VoIP call to their US 1800 number. Although I’m not sure if their US office is able to make changes to itineraries that originate from Japan (and vice versa).

[bschwindHN]

I try to fly with Skymark when I can because their website is gloriously basic in the best way possible, it's like barebones server-rendered HTML. And you can book your ticket without payment being in the critical flow. You get like 24 hours to pay and that removes SO much stress from booking airline tickets. I hope they never change or "modernize" it with some shitty JS framework.

[freetime2]

ANA’s domestic reservation system is not too bad in my experience, and I think is similarly basic like Skymark. They also allow you to hold a reservation for 24 hours without paying, and cancellations are free I think even after you’ve paid. It does struggle a bit with the concept of middle names, though.

But ANA’s international bookings use a completely different system that is the single worst website that I’ve used in the past 20 years. And yeah part of it is that they’ve tried to add some javascript without having the requisite competence to, say, perform proper input validation or render server error messages to the screen properly. I recently needed to enter an address, for example, but when I clicked the submit button nothing happened. It was only by snooping around in developer tools that I realized the server didn’t allow dashes in this particular address field.

Edit: apparently ANA is “upgrading” their domestic booking system to use the same Amadeus platform their international bookings use starting May 19, 2026. You can clearly see a different booking flow depending on whether you search before or after that date. So I retract my earlier positive statement about their domestic bookings.