Booking Singapore Air Flights

I have a new worst flight booking website. I once thought that Thomas Cook's website and their general business practices were the worst around (they are truly awful) but they have been surpassed by Singapore Air's dreadful abomination of a website.

Here are a few of the problems I encountered when trying to book a simple multi-city trip for myself and the wife:

• Idiotic timeouts - the booking process has a very short timeout counter so if you're trying to check other flight prices or look at hotel details or confirm that Singapore will actually be open on the day you visit you need to do it very quickly indeed. If you're a bit too slow Singapore Air will plague you with stupid pop-up messages warning you that your session is about to expire.
• Stupid security measures - I presume they're security measures, although messages like "The system has detected that you have used the back button..." are pretty pointless, especially when they then offer you an "Proceed without Update" button that doesn't take you forward because it prevents you from updating the page that you can't leave without having made an update. Infuriating.
• Broken drop-down boxes - there's absolutely no excuse for drop-down boxes that don't work properly but the ones that Singapore Air have deployed close if you get to the bottom of them making it extraordinarily difficult to hit the last option in the list. 
• Lack of an edit feature - if you make a mistake entering your passenger details or if you decide to change your departure time or if you simply want to check a choice you made two screens earlier, don't bank on Singapore Air helping you out. Instead of an Edit feature, Singapore Air will just dump you right back at the beginning of the process and, to make life especially difficult, the system won't even remember your chosen airports or dates so you'll have to enter them again. This gets a little annoying when the above faults conspire to require you to execute multiple flight searches.

It's not all bad. They have a feature that helps you find the cheapest flights within two days of your target dates and this we were eventually able to use to save about £200 by making minor changes to our arrangements. They were also, even before those changes, the cheapest airline we could find and they seem to fly at reasonably sensible times. Also, unlike the infamous Thomas Cook, Singapore Air don't add surcharges to your bill if you wish to pay by credit card, carry luggage or "enjoy" an in-flight meal.

If it weren't for the awfulness of their website, which can only have been contrived to discourage potential customers and make life awkward for travellers, Singapore Air would most definitely rank as a top-tier carrier. For a more balanced review of their services, including comments on their in-flight services and the general comfort of their aircraft, check back in early December.