Usually with any website which involves booking tickets, if I see it's a SPA I think there's a good chance that the company spent some effort on this and therefore care and it's likely to work OK.
If it's a server-rendered forms type application, I almost expect it to be poorly implemented, be frustrating to use or fail completely.
My suspicion is that, because these server-rendered forms type frameworks are very mature and much easier and faster to build something with, they are the go to option when budget is low, i.e. when quality is not a priority, and I think that may explain the correlation I've seen. Nothing to do with the underlying technology of course.
Personal experience, I've seen SPAs created with a one developer project, I've seen server-rendered forms created with a 30 person team. Both satisfied the needs of the business which was "to take data from text boxes and save them to the database".
My experience matches yours for large organizations; fairly or not, if I’m booking a plane ticket through the airline, an SPA page makes me feel confident that there was some real work put into it, while a basic server-side forms + JS approach makes me worry it’s a semi-abandoned afterthought.
That’s reversed for websites & apps for small companies and startups. In those cases, SPAs tend to feel fragile, buggy, and full of weird defaults and unusual behavior, especially compared to the relative simplicity of a basic form with some JS sprinkles.
No idea why that is, or if the perception is even accurate.
please keep in mind server-side doesn't mean necessarily "basic"
you can have a server-side app and still have the same user experience as a full-blown SPA app, as long as you know what you must do in the client for a great user experience.
Usually with any website which involves booking tickets, if I see it's a SPA I think there's a good chance that the company spent some effort on this and therefore care and it's likely to work OK.
If it's a server-rendered forms type application, I almost expect it to be poorly implemented, be frustrating to use or fail completely.
My suspicion is that, because these server-rendered forms type frameworks are very mature and much easier and faster to build something with, they are the go to option when budget is low, i.e. when quality is not a priority, and I think that may explain the correlation I've seen. Nothing to do with the underlying technology of course.