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

Carol Pucci from Seattle Times recently wrote this article about her experience with airlines that code-share:

“With more airlines marketing each other’s flights as code shares, it’s getting harder to figure out who’s actually doing the flying. It also makes it a bit harder to find the best price.  Code shares are marketing alliances that allow airlines to sell seats under their own name for flights operated by a partner airline. The airlines share in the revenues and passengers can earn and use their frequent-flier miles on either carrier.”

The irony is that on-line travel agents started a price war that has eliminated the incentive for airlines to distinguish themselves on “service” or even distance. This relieved them of the responsibility to excel. The underlying assumption imposed on the passenger is that all airlines are equal and all flights are the same – until they are not.  For example: Air France and Delta are code share partners:

Carol further writes: “Air France was selling a Seattle/Zagreb (Croatia) round trip, with a connection through Paris, for $1,214 versus $1,408 on Delta for the same flights, a savings of $194″.  

The law of one price

The problem with code sharing is not that you fly on the other partner’s aircraft, the problem is that the price is does not correlate with the exact same product, rather, it varies by whom you buy the ticket – that, by any definition, is broker’s world.

Private air service carriers and charter operators currently suffer from an extreme form of broker’s world that not only prevents carriers from code sharing, they also keep prices unpublished so the customer has no idea what they are paying for.

Of Brokers and Fixers

Imagine if Air France and Delta and United all had to operate different planes and there was no way for travelers to compare compare prices. Instead, a group of brokers could manipulate supply and demand to maximize their own profits. So for example, if the airplanes fly 1/2 empty, then brokers could charge double the airfare.  Obviously, this is an extremely inefficient way to operate an air service industry.

Fly Social in more ways than one

Social Flights is a platform that accommodates code sharing among many partner air service operators while also standardizing the cost of flying on a per-mile / per-time basis.  Social Flights performs the same yield management operations for a diverse inventory of private jets as the commercial carriers perform for their shared fleets.

The Social Flights platform permits the private air service operators to sell charter lift on a per-seat, per-leg basis.  Instead of generating dead heads (empty legs) operators can code share such that every flight is a primary leg.  Operators who are closest to the passenger will inherently be lower cost since a “re-positioning” fee would not be needed. This alone may cut the price of private travel by 50% (half the cost without dead/reposition fee) while also increasing operator revenue by 50% (by doubling the size of the market).

You can call it a code-share or you can call it a ride-share, but Social Flights calls it a breakthrough in air service efficiency.

Steven Frischling, aka: Fish, is a globe hopping airline emerging media consultant, one of our favorite bloggers, and a trusted advisor.  He has an uncanny ability to identify relevant trends with equal ability for compiling supporting data into useful forms.  In his recent post, Steve compiled a list for the percentage of twitter communications from airlines that contained the word “sorry” (or the equivalent in the language of the airline).

See the original post for details on how he compiled the following list:

So who is the most apologetic airline?  Its not about how many times they say they are sorry, it is the percent of times they say they are sorry.

@British_Airways - 3,766 in 20,757 tweets, 18.14%

@QantasAirways - 2,185 in 14,595 tweets, 14.97%

@AmericanAir - 2,232 in 15,432 tweets, 14.46%

@SingaporeAir - 43 in 385 tweets, 11.16%

@SAS – 238 (in Norwegian 88) in 3,457 tweets, 9.43%

@SouthwestAir – 711 in 8,092 tweets, 8.78%

@Delta – 299 in 4,211 tweets, 7.10%

@AirCanada - 167 in 3,356 tweets, 4.97%

@USAirways – 80 in 2,149 tweets, 3.72%

@United - 66 in 1,897 tweets, 3.47%

@KLM – 826 in 30,563 tweets, 2.7%

@MAS – 69 in 3,740 tweets, 1.84%

@GulfAir – 32 in 1,918 tweets, 1.66%

@AirBaltic - 52 in 3,172 tweets, 1.63%

@RoyalBruneiAir – 17 in 1,348 tweets, 1.26%

Sorry by Surprise

In a recent conversation with Steve, he mentioned that airlines called him up to find out HOW he was able to compile this information.  More important in our minds is, how can the airlines not know how to compile this information?

Apologies are very important because people do respond to a personal touch, so kudos to the airlines that have strong satisfaction outreach programs.  On the other hand, apologies are an opportunity for a company to improve and management should take an opportunity to review “sorry” data.

The “insurance” approach.

Insurance is something that pays out after the failure occured.  For example, AirBnB (a home sharing service) offers an insurance payout if your home is trashed by a renter from their network. Insurance utterly fails to compensate the victim for personal, physical, and emotional losses.  Airlines most often compensate a traveler with a free ticket and nothing else – they should be looking for route cause or they may find their selves on one of Steve’s lists.

Social Flights responds with a very simple solution; our ride sharing service and community air service program.

By eliminating many of the breakdown points of the complex and overloaded hub and spoke system, Social flights can reduce the number of situations where an apology may be required. When a community can literally operate their own airline to their own schedule from their own airport, they eliminate delays due to traffic, parking, long lines, delays, connections, service fees, congestion, overnights, and a host of traveller harassment.

Go ahead and forgive, but don’t forget that there are options…