Kristi Barrow

Airlines flying between Australia and the USA

I need to travel up to Seattle for a friends wedding in October, so I thought I would compare some of the different airlines now that we finally have some competition across the pacific.  In addition to Qantas and United, we now have V Australia who started flying this year and Delta who begins services in July.  On the weekend, I  checked to see the prices on my  www.expedia.com.au (Yes, I did use to work there) and it seemed that Delta had by far the best deal to Seattle.  Probably due to their interline arrangements for the domestic leg of the flight (LAX-SEA).

Today I tried to visit the site directly as I was curious at what my options were for joining a frequent flyer program.

Locating Delta Airlines Australia site

Firstly I tried delta.com.au – oops splash page for a webdesign company

Then I tried deltaairlines.com.au – this is when it got very interesting!

What just happened?

Look at the error message closely. I guess I must have absentmindedly typed in two www’s.  So I tried again with deltaairlines.com.au – same problem!  This is very weird.

Let’s check the server headers

I thought I would have a look at the headers to try and find out what was going on.

That seems reasonable – so what is happening with www.deltaairlines.com.au – I think you have probably guessed!

oops

Can anyone think of a reason as to why they would do this?  They are still relatively unknown in the Australian market so I can’t see this being a big issue for them, but if they are not ready to launch a site, perhaps a simple splash page is a better option?