Plane Conversations

Debbie Miller is a social media and hospitality blogger who recently outlined some social media efforts of airlines.  Her analysis is important for two reasons;  first, it demonstrates how the industry can use social media to communicate with travelers and their network of friends and family.

Second, it demonstrates how communities respond to social media inputs; what works and what does not.

Luggage Tracking

Delta Airlines implemented a system for travelers to track their checked baggage. Via the airline carrier’s iPhone app, guests are able to monitor the whereabouts of their luggage at all times. [response unknown]

Influencer Events

In the fall, All Nippon Airways (ANA), Japan’s leading airline carrier, announced that its “Inspiration of Japan” service brand would be introduced to the Los Angeles-Narita (Tokyo) route beginning in January.  [ANA is threw a big party through social media resulting in 5.4 Million brand impressions]

Choose Your Seat Mate

Recently, Royal Dutch airline KLM announced a new program called “Meat and Seat,” allowing people to choose who they might sit next to on a flight by viewing other travelers’ social media profiles. [Reaction remains mixed]

15 Minute Flights

Last summer, a bridge over LA’s popular 405 Freeway was set to be demolished, leaving a significant portion of highly-trafficked highway to be closed for a weekend in July.  As a result, JetBlue Airlines decided to offer $4 flights from Long Beach to Burbank and vice versa on Saturday.  [surpassed all expectations and all flights sold out in 3 hours.]

Building a company on Social Media:

Meanwhile, Social Flights is building the company on Social Media – and we are learning many new things.  Today we have over 14,000 registered users, over 90 private operators representing 500 aircraft.  We have dozens of partners who want to service our travelers.

Social Flights has opened flights between Branson, Milwaukee, Austin, and Nashville.  We have flown Football, NASCAR, and Corporate passengers as well as VIPs, Celebrities, and politicians.  Apparently, our  social media design is working well.

Lessons learned

Ideally, we would like to have a person on the ground in each location to interpret data related to that location to proactively match supply and demand.   This person would be able to nudge a community toward the private air service option and educate them to the value proposition.

Now comparing our experience with the airline experience cited above, there are several similarities;

• Each seeks to distinguish themselves by introducing a scalable service
• They operate in a hyper-local domain.

In other words, they seek to improve the travel experience and they have someone on the ground meeting a local need.  Those are the activities that work best.

The use of social media in air service industry is still very new, but already we can see important trends for social media usage in air service industries

Social Flights is preparing for release an important document which spells out the relationship that Social Flights seeks to create with private jet operators across the United States.

The document is a written specifically to operators of private aircraft fleets.  Our objective is to demonstrate how Social Flights can increase their fleet utilization, aircraft yields, and overall business success.

The first part of this paper begins with a discussion about empty legs and finishes with a discussion of all the ways that empty seats on empty legs can be converted to cash flow.

The second part of this document discusses the challenges of technology in aviation.  While airlines use big data to maximize their profits, the on-line travel agencies use big data to minimize airline profits.  The resulting game of cat and mouse creates pricing silos that distort markets.

Social Flights can convert your seats to cash flow one way or another, but cash flow nonetheless.  Social Flights restores consistency among the pricing silos so that travelers can compare true door-to-door value of a private flight vs. a commercial flight.  Social flights creates true transparency to increase the efficiency of the market.

***

Travel is the most expensive advertising vertical in the world.  Airplanes act as market amplifiers for products, services, and events.  A great deal of marketing value can sit in those empty seats and there is no way for operators to convert that value to cash.  Social media is an amazing marketing tool that can amplify a message across a broad landscape where content is king and reputation is currency.

NextGen air traffic management will increase the number of airplanes that can occupy the airspace, but it does little for ground traffic or traveler comfort – yet this same technology will open smaller airports and private routes to private operators.  Social Flights will act like “code sharing” agreements that the airlines have adopted for years.

Finally; the door-to-door value of the Social Flights experience must include integration with ground transportation, hospitality, events, tourism boards, corporations, communities, and ultimately, economic development policy.  This is where the commercial airlines utterly fail in their profit calculations.

Social Flights air services will provide a platform of shared legs, shared inventory, and coordinate consistent route structures from a pool of operators and aircraft using the same yield management and fleet management principles of a large commercial airline. Social Flights brings these stakeholders to the table, converts their data to a shared value format, and provides a seamless  travel experience that is always unique, always fast, always luxurious, and always safe.

In return, we ask that operators provide Social Flights with data feed to their inventory.  This may require an operator to add a business process to their day-to-day activity, but it is our intention to be able to deliver far more value than what the operator invests.  In short, you will be able to calculate the ROI on your association with Social Flights.

Let’s fly together!

Until we can price all air transportation correctly, we will not be able to price any air transportation correctly.

Social Flights is the premier air transportation company that sells private jet service on a per seat basis.  This is important because there is no other way to compare the time-value of a private jet against the time-value of a commercial jet unless they are priced in the same manner.

Unfortunately, highly competitive markets determine the price of a seat on a commercial airline, not necessarily distance of the flight.  This does not make very much sense – for nearly any other product, you pay for how much you consume. If only commercial airlines were priced like private aircraft: by the mile.

Why does an airline ticket need to be 400 dollars 6 weeks prior to departure and 600 dollars 2 weeks prior to departure, except to maximize profit? Nothing else changes except as a proportion to distance traveled. But think of all the accountants, marketing personnel, and strategic planners constantly manipulating price inputs that have nothing to do with passenger satisfaction.

Every airline use essentially the same types of aircraft, they pay the same cost in fuel, and they have similar direct costs in labor, landing fees and gate contracts.  You would think that a 3000-mile trip would cost X amount more than a 1500-mile trip… all day long, for each and every airline.

This chart shows the actual fuel cost to carry a 200 lb payload 1750 miles between DFW and LAX for various types of commercial aircraft assuming jet fuel price is about 3 dollars per gallon (at the time that this industry study was published).

I did some back o’ the napkin calculations and concluded that a Lear 35 burns 5 times more fuel per 200 lb passenger than an MD-80.  A Phenom 300 is about half of that, or 2.5 times that of the MD-80.  The average would be around 3.3 times the commercial jet.

The Golden Ratio

This is a terribly difficult calculation to make so bear with my assumptions here.  But suppose all things being equal, we can say generally that a private aircraft cost is 3 -5 times greater than the commercial airplane while the door-to-door time is  1/3 – 1/5 the time of the commercial flight.  The factor of 3 – 5 (depending on the comparable averages) puts the cost of the traveler time in parity with the cost of the airline time.

Why does this matter?

Now, some honest comparative market analysis can take place by simply adding and subtracting time and money from both parts of the Golden Ratio to account for various attributes of the trip.  For example: shorter drive to smaller airports, no long lines, non-stop flights can be added or subtracted from the “time” part of the ratio.  Meanwhile; the cost of parking, airport taxes, cost of food, cost of lodging, and the cost of traveling to your final destination, etc., can be added or subtracted from the cost side of the ratio.

The Data will set us free

To liberate this information is to empower the traveler, the operators, the community and the hospitality industry to make rational decisions.  Communities can design rational incentives for tourism.  Corporations can make rational decisions for employee travel, and economic planners can make rational investments in intermodal transportation.

Next Generation Air Traffic Management represents a major evolution in ground based air traffic control to satellite based air traffic management; it also represents an opportunity for private aviation to deliver far more value to the communities that they serve.

In order to accomplish this, Social Flights is developing a unifying business method that accurately and reliably matches supply and demand for private transportation assets across several thousand airports in the United States. NextGen, combined with the Internet and social media, gives the private aviation industry a set of tools that were unimaginable 20 or 30 years ago when the private aviation market last shifted.

How will private travel evolve?

NextGen will use aviation-specific applications for existing, widely-used technologies such as GPS, Weather Forecasting, data networking, and digital communication. Not surprisingly, these applications will lead to new procedures and airport infrastructure.

Some of these changes may be quite predictable

To get an idea as to how these new technologies will impact aviation, it may be a simple matter to compare how these EXACT same technologies have changed social cooperation in general.  This prediction is valid because we all cooperate for our little piece of the sky.

Society has learned to cooperate in amazing ways as mobile devices, VOIP, GPS, Weather Reports, Traffic Reports, and non-corporate social organization become evermore commonplace.  New business models constantly form around the technology.   The result has been a profound shift in power and influence to those (for better or for worse) who can access and curate relevant information AND then share that information with people in their networks (and beyond).

Social Flights is taking the lead and calling on all private operators to join with us to build a common platform for private aircraft inventory and ground operations across the United States:   

• Where are your jets stationed?
• What inventory do you have available?
• Where are your empty legs going?
• Are you willing to share facilities or “code-share” with other operators?
• Are you willing to cooperate with the major airlines?
• If entrepreneurs in your community had access to the whole system, would this help you?
• If corporations and event planners had access to the whole system, would this help you?
• Are local hospitality and support services sharing information with you?

The New Technology Advantage

Since the late 1800’s America has replaced every single telephone pole with a new one every 50 years or so.  Today, every less developed country can simply build relatively few cellular towers and avoid that mess. For this reason, we can assume that airlines no longer have the advantage of vast hub infrastructure when together, we can just as easily sort people and planes with access to the right data shared across the right network.

We recently stumbled upon a great group of people dedicated to the promotion of the fastest growing specialty in social media.   The position of  Community Manager, in our opinion, is growing to a size and scope that warrants its own professional classification.

via Community Managers: Where do you live? | My Community Manager.

What is MyCMGR.com?

Much like chemistry grew from alchemy (the task of trying to turn lead into gold) Community management is more than PR.  Community Management is the science of understanding how to create many important products from all the social elements.  At Social Flights, we are developing a new class of business methods that will rely heavily on the skills and tool set of the Community Manager. It is our suspicion that we are not alone in our requirements for this emerging profession.

Community Organization:

Socia Flights is more than a charter airline, we are a ride sharing system for private jets.  In order for our transactions to be most equitable to the traveler, we need the community to self-organize around a collection of airline inventory without using a hub airport.  This is not an easy problem to solve and herein lies the perfect game for the modern community manager.

Our vision for the future…

Social Flights envisions a Community Organizer to be able to look at data related to where people want to go and match it to available aircraft that can take them there.  Next, the organizer needs to find people who want to return on the empty airplane after the first passengers are dropped off.  Each time, the community organizer creates new data and feeds it back into the system.

As the system of data from all CO’s gets larger, it will become easier for the organizer to make connections in their specialty.   In the big picture; every shared asset  in a community from airplanes, cars, hotels, schools, and even government agencies can be operated by experienced community organizers.  Now imagine that all this can happen outside the construct of the familiar “corporation”

MyCMGR.com works with:

All of us at Social Flights extend our deepest holiday wishes to all the people who have supported us during this our Launch year.  A lot has happened since February 2011.  We thought we should report to you what has been accomplished and some new developments underway:

Over 13,000 people have joined Social Flights Traveler’s Network receiving unlimited access to the following services:    

• Over 90 Private Charter Operators have joined the Social Flights platform.
• Over 500 aircraft are available in the Social Flights Virtual Fleet.
• Social Flights website can now deliver an instant auto quote under our “Create a Flight” option.
• Social Flights Allows you to embed our quoting feature in your website
• Social Flights Developed a full suite of Community Airline services for small cities that are losing – or never had – airline service.
• Social Flights allows members to create alerts to desired locations or invitations to join a flight formation.
• Social Flights assures privacy with our internal networking features which are never released to the public domain.

Beginning next year:

• Social Flights will expand scheduled public jet charter service through the community airline program to smaller markets and even “stranded” communities.
• Social Flights will expand one-way flight program from 100 per day to over 1000 per day
• Social Flights is building out the affinity travel and social jet charter service to include colleges, Sports, concerts, conventions, events, tourism, and family travel.
• Our Elite Travel Services division will initiate international social jet charter service between the US and China as well as Latin America.

To our Partners:

Our partner network is growing to include hotels, Concierge services, tour operators, marketing firms, Facebook page owners, event managers, and economic development agencies.

Our partner network will continue to grow to serve the traffic that we now steadily deliver hassle-free to your communities.

These are the highlights off the accomplishments this year and some insider information on what to expect next year. 

If you are a traveler please invite your friends and colleagues to share a jet.  If you are a community or event organizer, please keep in mind that we are here to serve you and your community travel needs.  If you are a certified aircraft operator, let us help you increase utilization of your inventory.  If you are a hospitality or experience service provider, please let us help you build travel packages around the freedom of flight.