Delta Disses Macs

Here in the Twin Cities the Northwest/Delta merger has been big news. Minneapolis and Saint Paul was the hub for Northwest and thus it will be hard to fly in or out of Minnesota without encountering Delta. As a Mac user, I loved the nwa.com web site. In almost 10 years of flying Northwest, I never had a Mac-related browser hitch. When you consider how Apple was doing 10 years ago, that’s pretty amazing.

Last week I used Delta’s web site for the first time. It had some major hiccups related to seat selection that prevented me from buying a ticket with Safari. I started over again with Firefox and all went well. OK, I thought, that is unfortunately more typical of the industry. I’ll just let them know and hopefully they will fix the bug.

I filed a report and got back the a form letter that said, among other things, the following:

To view delta.com, one of the following browsers is recommended:

Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher

Firefox 2 or higher for Windows and Mac

Safari 2 or higher for Mac

Great! Safari was on the list. I wrote back pointing out I’d used Safari 4, which was supposed to be supported. That’s when I got this puzzling reply:

Currently, delta.com is designed and constructed to be best viewed by a

Windows-based, PC platform using Internet Explorer 6.0 (and higher), as

well as Netscape 7.2 (and higher) browsers. This was established based

on the dominant type of users throughout the industry. We regret that we

cannot guarantee service on every computer platform. However, we will

regularly review the Mac population of users and respond accordingly.

Huh? IE6 and Netscape7.2? Not even any support for the Mac until some further “regular review” happens? That does not sound very helpful. Given the penetration of Macs into the home market that sounds downright disrespectful of customers. Not to mention blind to the direction web standards are heading.

If anyone knows the right way to put pressure on Delta to fix delta.com, I’d love to hear it!