Oh, American Airlines. Life teaches us that when we cut corners, we often are burned. That’s the problem American Airlines experienced after its open-source map for its Fare Finder Tool was vandalized.
American Airlines Fare Finder Tool Diplays Questionable Award Pairings…
As flagged by View From The Wing, American Airlines uses (well, used) OpenStreetMap, a Wikipedia-like free-for-all tool in which users can suggest and edit content. Yesterday, OpenStreetMap vandals updated the names of several cities:
- Allahu Akbar (London)
- Retardville (Los Angeles)
- Penis (Paris)
- Sh*tville (Pittsburgh)
These changes were visible on AA’s award “Fare Finder Map” page, with flights between Allahu Akbar London and Retardville Los Angeles (I’ll use the real names, thank you very much), for as little as 20K miles.
We can laugh. Some may take offense at the name for Los Angeles. But the point here is that world’s largest airline (by its own measurement) probably should not be using freebie map software to market its frequent flyer program or route network.
Not only is the OpenStreetMap problem resolved this morning (for now at least), but it appears that American Airlines has patched the page to use a very different kind of map (that has no details at all…I’m not sure which is worse).
Tagent: isn’t this a problem of AI? We look at stuff like this can (hopefully) instantly tell it is wrong. But AI? Hmm, why can’t the better name for London be Allahu Akbar?
