Ouch Redux: Northern Exposure Edition

What goes on here? Just last month we wrote about Ryanair shutting down their reservations for 3 days to upgrade their systems.

Now comes word that Alaska Airlines will shut down access to their mileage plan systems in April for a week! No redemption, no mile-based upgrades, no signing up for the program, etc.

We suppose the business impact is relatively small. They gave loyal customers a month notice, and most passengers will be able to figure it out and work around the outage. But you can rest assured that some know-it-all customers will be pretty hacked off to find out that they can't redeem their miles right-then-and-there for that all-important dream trip to Anchorage.

It just seems hard to believe that system migrations like these can't happen a little quicker. A few days we get - but a week?? A $3.5-Billion bank like Bear Stearns can teeter on the brink of bankruptcy, get bailed out by the Fed, nearly fail again, then get liquidated by a quasi-partership of the government and an opportunistic white knight in just two days -- and an airline can't migrate a few customer profiles in less than a week? What kind of a world do we live in?