Ryanair responds to MSE dossier of name-change complaints - MSE News

Well as of tonight there is still at least one glitch because I am one of two people on a booking and the lead passenger Wilhemina has checked herself in (but not me - more as an experiment, I haven't yet) but the MyRyanair App on my iPhone does currently invite me to "Sit with Peter". I am Peter. So that shows me that the "Sit with" invitation part of the App makes a hash of telling me who I could sit with. It may as well invite to sit with Ermintrude if it isn't going to invite me to sit with Wilhemina!

Anyway, if I click on the invitation in the App, the next part of the routine becomes more circumspect and says "Sit next to your companion" - its almost as if some App coder or their boss said "dammit, release it - that's good enough: chunk one isn't perfect - it uses the wrong name but no harm done, chunk 2 is neutral on name so that's fine, chunk 3 of the code prefaces what happens next with some arm-waving text to suggest that if the user now scrolls carefully through the seat plan looking for their companion's initials, they will find them, so that's fine too".

(Chunk 3 of the buy a reserve seat and "Sit with" routine takes you to the seat plan and that DOES (sort of) know the identity of the companion because it invites you to hunt through all 31½ rows x 6 seats and look for their initials )

As I mentioned on the other thread, there are inconsistent and soft digital verifications of the ID of who is accessing a booking, especially a multi-passenger booking. On an iPhone my AppleID will be linked to MyRyanair account, but I could be anyone, I am pretty certain it is possible for me to add to MyRyanair, and perhaps even manage, anyone else's booking if I've simply been given the 6 character booking reference and I know the email address used by the lead passenger. I don't need the actual booking name or the lead passenger's Ryanair account password, and I'm pretty certain I didn't need to be on the booking myself last time I tried it. This may be deliberately "soft" much like the Amadeus system used by many other major airlines for years seems only to have required the six digit booking reference and passenger last name. Nothing else was required to access the booking I think? So equally that too has always struck me as a bit insecure.

If I am right, I don't know why either system is left so "soft".

I read that in 2017 after just a three year contract with Amadeus, Ryanair did not renew the contract, but perhaps their coding still contains bits of forgotten or unmodified code to synch with the Amadeus last name enquiry routines. Perhaps with Ryanair's insistence in 2018 of going in harder and harder with the "Sit next to your partner/companion" type marketing, simultaneously with all the messing around with Priority baggage etc, this may have been putting pressure on the coders to make their MyRyanair App do the more complex companion name-linked selling. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that coders had blundered into using some incompletely modified code snippets linked to LastName and unwittingly caused them to be in the mix in mistaken ways?

Worse things have happened in computing, and mistakes do happen with particular fields of data , getting used in the wrong place e.g. FirstName as in the above "Sit with" example, or "LastName" as in the reported MSE £115 a pop examples. But aviation companies especially are supposed to freely acknowledge and share what they discover when they make mistakes in their operations. That's so we are all clear about what went wrong so it doesn't happen again. And of course a lot of what makes aircraft fly these days is automated by means of computers too, not just the bookings! So aviation companies are not supposed to react by first blinding us with a few swamping statistics to convince us the alleged mistakes happen so rarely that we can ignore the reports. In aviation especially, that kind of response gives exactly the wrong impression.

Anyone care to comment? Ryanair for example?

As a bit of a computer programmer and erstwhile analyst I often recognise faster than most customers, evidence of odd bits of flakey coding when I see them, and if I see evidence of glitches in one sub-routine in an App, then I naturally expect I might find glitches elsewhere in the App despite the assurances about rigorous testing if I've already discovered self-evidently the assurances may not be entirely well founded

Clearly from the way we see they have responded to MSE, Ryanair doesn't care very much what we on MSE think, but each time they demonstrate they don't care, it is surely completely fair to ask ok if they don't care about this, then do they care about that? And if that was a safety imperative ... well, each of us might well form our opinion as we will ...