Airline hell

Here I am, trying to book cheap flights for Cleodhna's mum and her sisters (well, two out of three), and I'm running into the maze of random stuff that is cheap discount airlines. Travel agent / airline websites seem to have a vendetta against the back button, so if you decide that you just want to change one thing, and use the back button, the web site complains at you volubly until you give up or storm out of the room to rant at Cleodhna, who doesn't deserve this but, hey, she's there.

The worst thing is that these sites decide that if you don't want what you wanted originally, you should enter everything again. Doesn't matter if the only thing you want to change is *one airport*, and the other airport, and the dates, and the number of passengers, should be what you had before. Grrr. Fuckwits.

Then you get web sites (web sites, let me point out here) that say "Thank you very much for your Fare request. Our agents will quote you a fare as soon as possible, normally within 1 to 2 business hours." WTF is going on here?

(Navigation toolbar: what's the difference between cheap airline tickets and cheap flights? Oh, it's an ad thing. Never mind.)

Oh, and I'm really upset when something that calls itself "cheaptravelnetwork.com" tells me that the only thing it knows about is British Airways.

(BTW, I don't mind learning about this stuff; it will be useful in the future.)

Oh, random comment: how ironic that they named the *national* (as opposed to the *International*) airport in Washington, DC after Ronald Reagan. Says it all about the Republicans.

Oh, and how come there is a Glasgow International Airport in *Montana*?

And why is it that all the major cheap flight websites are UK-based? I mean, I'm going through Google. I shouldn't expect a UK bias. Is this the age-old problem of the US not realising that there is a world outside their borders? Or is this just Google being smart and realising I'm in the UK?

Anyway, I've spent some time researching cheap flights, only to discover that they're all UK to USA, and you can't get anything decent in the other direction. Time to hit the newsgroups, I think.