Southwest Ding! Revisited
A while back I installed the “Ding!” application from Southwest Airlines. Today, I am uninstalling that application.
While the application does have some upsides, they are not the upsides you want. The app is unobtrusive. This is good for most applications from a simplicity standpoint, but it’s not great to have your users think “at least I don’t have to look at this all the time.” After opening the application from the system tray, where it resides full time, you are greeted to a window with a questionable color palette and one link.
The buttons on the right are not buttons at all, but rather links to Southwest’s airlines. While this program is not malware of any kind, its dishonest design generates worlds of mistrust.
Lastly, the app is not useful for me at all. Every “Ding!” price that I’ve seen so far in the past few weeks has been for a one-way trip. I have no use for one-way tickets. I’m sure there are people out there who do buy one-way tickets on a whim, but they don’t have any immediate family, job, or other commitment to speak of.
If you install this app, it won’t cause any harm beyond taking up space on your machine, but that’s all it did for me.
Usually they have one-way ding prices for both ways between any two cities… so by booking both of them, you can effectively do a round trip booking.