Thursday, February 15, 2007

Web 0.0 at United Airlines

Passwords are a pain in the neck. Having good password recovery on a site in a necessity.

I almost never fly United Airlines anymore - I live in Houston and Continental is almost always the best and cheapest way to get anywhere. But I have some miles with them, and when I got an email warning me that they'll all expire at the end of the year, I thought it was worth seeing how many there were and whether there was a good way to use them through some non-travel offer.

What's my United password? How should I know? So after trying to most logical candidates (none of which were correct) I clicked the "forgotten password" link and saw this:

My reaction: are you kidding me? Write a letter? Maybe I'll have the butler put it in an envelope, seal it with our family crest in wax, and deliver it United's door.

Would it be so hard to put a button that says, "Click here and we'll mail a new password to your address of record?"

Apparently. I realize that miles are valuable and there are security issues... but it's not this hard to get a password reset from my bank, for Pete's sake.

Someone let us know when the 21st century dawns over at United.

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