Great Airline Booking Design Pattern Spreading

For a long time now Lufthansa has been doing something on their site that I found ingenious every time I saw it: how they presented their fare’s and dates. It so incredibly simple and yet amazingly efficient. I never bothered to blog about it though, until I saw it pop up on a few other sites.

As opposed to showing you a list of dates and prices for departing and returning flights, they put the prices into a grid with the dates as X/Y values, making it a lot easier to find out what date is cheapest to fly. As an added touch, the cheapest day/flight combination was also highlighted. I wondered why I wasn’t encountering it more often. Recently I did go shopping for some airline tickets and much to my delight I saw Lufthansa’s design pattern implemented. I did a bit of research and found a few more airlines that were doing it. Below some of the results.

Lufthansa
The original (just to be clear: I am not sure whether Lufthansa used it first, I did however encounter it there for the first time). Lufthansa indicates your current date by highlighting them and adding an arrow. What I love most is the color indication given:

Finnair
Here is almost a direct copy, with the difference that the cheapest prices are sadly not highlighted:

KLM
The Dutch carrier implements the grid exactly the same, except for the dates, which are outlined as opposed to highlighted with colour:

I guess you can truly appreciate how nice this works if you see the alternative, which wasn’t hard to find.

Easy Jet
This represenation isn’t all that bad and the attempt is somewhat reminiscent, but it still doesn’t give me the nice oversight:

Olympic Airlines
Finally, if you look at Olympic’s offering you might start to wonder who thought that was a good idea, especially compared to the first three examples shown:

I wasn’t able to find any examples on US Airlines, so perhaps this is a European development. By all accounts though: I think it is a big improvement.