Frontier Airlines

oking, security check-in and shopping for fares right on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch or Google Android device. They don’t succeed much though.

Interface

The UI on both the iOS and Android app is quite efficient, presenting all the different functionalities in well-laid out panels, tabs and icons. At the bottom of the screen, you can access the various sub-menus such as Home, Book Flights, My Flights and Flight Status. All the options are denoted with large icons, and navigation through the multiple screens is quite intuitive. The interactive route maps provided are easy to read and understand.

Interface score: 8/10

Key Features

Frontier Airlines markets itself as a budget carrier, but the customer experience with this airline has been terrible mostly, and you’d think the app would help out a bit. The app should provide useful functionalities such as a mobile boarding pass, mobile check-in, flight booking, checking the status of your flight and an interactive route map.

The Flight Status option leads you to a screen with the available flights, their flight numbers and ETAs. You can also check an interactive route map for the airline flights in your region.

The app was initially launched on iOS (currently for iOS version 9.0 and up). The Android APK was released later (for Android 4.1 or higher), so it’s an app for all Android devices as well. Both the App Store and Google Play apps for flight management are free and offer no in-app purchases.

I won’t rate this section highly because the features rarely work.

Features score: 3/10

Usability

Most folks who have got the IPA and APK versions, myself included, have complained about how poor the experience is. Having a beautiful design won’t help much if the features don’t work. Also, since this app focuses on the service industry, the support staff should always be ready to solve customer issues especially with an app that takes over vital functions such as flight booking and checking flight status.

These features should be helpful, but most of them don’t work.  Whenever I check flight details on both the iOS and Android mobile app, I always get a connection error. At first I thought it was my mobile data, but I get the same problem even with unlimited bandwidth. There’s not much else to add; most the features just don’t work, even after updating and installing the latest version.

The app may show you that a flight is on time, while in fact it has been delayed by a few hours. I tried to check in repeatedly, but that option didn’t work and instead rerouted me back to the main screen. Customer service isn’t expedient when solving issues with this app. Terrible overall experience.

User experience score: 2/10

I tried installing several updates for this app, but most of them didn’t work. The ever-present glitches don’t seem to be going away anytime soon.

Bottom Line

I wouldn’t recommend this app to anyone, and the reviews speak for themselves. It has a pleasant design, but that’s where the pleasant experience begins and ends. This is far from a leading airline app in my book.