Is it innovation or just good marketing?
Delta’s new way of booking airline and charter flights together through Delta Air Elite.
There is not much in the way of innovation in business aviation to report or discuss in the past 30 days. Innovation in our industry seems to be coming in increments measured in inches not miles.
Apple is on a constant innovation track with a new I-Phone this week and the I-Pad has sold over 2 million in a couple months. It seems that every few weeks new functionality comes into the mobile computing market to enhance productivity. Innovation in the technology sector continues to happen at an ever increasing rate, and meanwhile our industry of private aviation creeps along. Isn’t aviation supposed to be about productivity much like computing technology?
Delta and its subsidiary Delta AirElite are making a valiant attempt at innovation with the announcement that their customers can book segments on the airline and the private jet in a seamless transaction.
What Delta doesn’t say is that private jet travel is still expensive. More expensive than the majority of their customers can afford, so the announcement is really geared towards the users of private jet service to let them know they can also book their first class tickets to Europe at the same time they book the private jet to get them to the gateway airport. And at the end of the day airline service is still airline service working within a broken system – not the sole fault of the airlines in my opinion, but broken nonetheless.
If ever an industry was begging for innovation it is the aviation industry. Aviation is especially in need of innovation at the point of service delivery – that point where passengers get on the aircraft to travel.
On one side people are fed up with the increasing hassle of flying via the airlines and on the other side, where the experience of flying in a private jet is great, for most the cost is prohibitive.
It is really a shame that we can’t figure out how to bring the price gap closer. Innovation on the private aviation side might even pull the airlines up a notch. Especially if the airlines wake up and find the business traveler defecting to a different mode of air travel.
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