Cebu Pacific Air rolled out a major update to their website, cebupacificair.com earlier this month. The new website sports a fresher, cleaner look and a more organized layout. Long due for an overhaul, this much-needed redesign by the Philippines’ top budget carrier sure looks pretty on the outside, but what changed underneath?
Apparently, a lot.
It is interesting to note that despite the lightweight look, the front page of cebupacificair.com weighs in at over 3 MegaBytes. This is not a lot for today’s standards. Most broadband connections can surely handle 3MB on first load. In addition, caching and prefetching by modern browsers should help ease loading time but what’s really interesting is that out of those 3 MegaBytes, 330 KiloBytes goes to simple yellow JPEG banner, 322 KiloBytes goes to a JavaScript file, and 315 KiloBytes goes to a CSS file.
Perhaps optimization is not high priority for a resource and traffic-intensive site like Cebu Pacific Air.
As with every new software release, expect a number of bugs. While most can easily be dismissed, perhaps the most important module, the seat sale and promo aspect of the site, appears to be suffering from major bugs. This surfaced today as Cebu Pacific Air launches its 8 peso seat sale to all local and international destinations. The promotion is being held in commemoration of Bonifacio Day, a pubic holiday in the Philippines normally celebrated on November 30.
After spending over an hour, I could not book a single promo flight.
Although the calendar/selector shows that there’s an available promo seat for that date, when you switch it will not show any promo flights available. In addition, if you select a one-way trip originating from another country, it will show the currency of the originating country but the price will stay in its unconverted value in Philippine pesos. Click on the screenshot above to enlarge.
Perhaps it’s a user problem, and there’s just something I’m not doing right. Are you getting the same problems? Share your thoughts in the comments area below.