BA had some tracking request inline on the “payment processing” page which when blocked by my pihole prevents me from ever getting to the confirmation page, just have to refresh your email and wait for the best.

I have no idea how these companies, which make quite a decent amount of money at least up until 2020, can have such utterly poor sites.

I once counted some 20+ redirects on a single request during this process heh..

I don’t know what they’re doing but most every single sign on tool I’ve seen redirects 10-20 times during the sign on process (and then dumps you to the homepage to navigate your way back).

Probably to get first party cookies on a handful of domains

Yeah, the Google flights issue is difficult. On one hand, the business practice is problematic. On the other hand, Google flights is so much better than its competitors it's ridiculous.

If there was a way to split Google flights into a separate company and somehow ensure it wouldn't devolve into absolute trash like its competitors, that would be a good thing.

It was ITA and prior to Google buying them, did a pretty good business selling backend flight shopping services to aggregators and airlines.

Shopping for flights is a surprisingly technically difficult thing to do well.

I'm talking about flight status. Not Google Flights, shopping, or booking.

There are events associated with flight status that Google doesn't know. Like change fee waivers, cash comp awards to take a later or earlier flight, seat upgrades, etc.

It's not Google's prerogative to scrape a website and display its content, no matter how awful the website.

If 1 airline let me view information in a friendly fashion and the other didn't I would do business with the first.

Lest we forget the money in that scenario is from butts in seats not clicks on a website. The particular example is ill chosen as google is actually taking on a cost, taking nothing, and gifting the airline a better ui.

If you make an awful website that can be scrapped it's a matter of when not if someone will take your data and give it to your consumers whether your trying to upsell them or not...