Plane Conversations

Frontier Airlines recently announced it’s dropping nonstop service from Milwaukee to six cities, cutting the number of daily flights nearly in half. Effective in April, the airline will end direct flights to Grand Rapids, Dallas-Fort Worth, Kansas City, Philadelphia, Phoenix and Newark. Frontier’s daily departures will be reduced from 32 to 18.

While Social Flights is announcing new air service between Milwaukee, Branson, Nashville, and Austin – Frontier Airlines is announcing the reduction of services and staff from Milwaukee.  The following report from media FOX6now and Milwaukee Business Journal highlight some of the local implications, impacts, broken promises and lost dreams.

According to a notice filed Monday with the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development, the layoffs are expected to occur in April. The notice states that 230 of the employees are flight crew members who will be reassigned to bases outside of Milwaukee.

230 of the 446 layoffs will be reassigned – as will their families, their children will move out of school, houses will be liquidated in a poor RE market, and communities will lose trust anchors. The new cuts are on top of Frontier‘s decision last fall to eliminate routes to eight other destinations.

Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett released a statement Monday after these layoffs were announced, saying: “The loss of 500 jobs is a setback for the region.  My hope is that other airlines will step in and fill the void in this critically important market.”

Frontier is leaving Milwaukee for reasons that would also hold for every other airline; fuel prices, labor prices, large jets, corporate ROI thresholds, etc.  Meanwhile, Social Flights operates under public charter regulations organizing local private operators and supports them with modern aircraft allowing communities to access important hubs as well as sister cities (such as Grand Rapids).

The Community Remembers the promises:

“When that whole deal was made, when Republic bought Midwest and Frontier, there were all these promises made to Milwaukee that they were not only going to keep the service here, but that they were going to bring in hundreds and hundreds of jobs,” Rovito said.

Instead, nearly 800 positions have been cut since November, and the most recent wave of cuts will move more than 200 jobs out of Milwaukee, while completely getting rid of another 200. “Just on its face, it’s really bad news for Milwaukee travelers,” Rovito said.

Who holds the cards?

Communities go through great efforts to attract air service from promising yields to providing public infrastructure to enduring noise and traffic – the airlines take this completely for granted.

Fewer flights means it will be more difficult for travelers to get to their destinations, and also likely more expensive. “It was a convenient flight for me in this particular instance,” Scott Sowa, who was on a Frontier flight heading to Grand Rapids, said. “I would hate to lose that convenience.”

Apparently, communities are not what Frontier needs to remain profitable.  They no longer need Milwaukee because they found business elsewhere.  They are an airline – they can go elsewhere…. they are not a community.

Where communities are the contingency plan

In a statement, the company says: “The reduction in service is another step in our continued effort to ensure that Frontier is a competitive and sustainably profitable airline.”

In other words, ‘Their survival is contingent upon your loss – not your gain.’ FOX6 tried to get in touch with someone from Frontier Airlines Monday, but our calls were unreturned.

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 media marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) are no longer just the shiny new soapbox for advertisers, they have become powerful tools for organizing communities.

We all know that social media campaigns have become the PR machine of the modern airline, but they still fail to understand the difference between community awareness and harnessing the power of community engagement.

Who has time to Twitter?  

Many private operators are too focused on the day-to-day business of keeping their fleet in top readiness to start the long haul learning curve of social media marketing and SEO.

As a result, those same few brokers and agents (you know who they are) appear on the top of the search engine listing even in your city search!   While paid search placement may buy some brand awareness for the brokers, only active blogging, worthy cross linking and strategic partnerships produce the powerful engagements that bring you customers who bring you customers who bring you customers, and so on.

Building these relationships can be difficult, time consuming, and expensive. 

Social Flights has trained and experienced account managers that can efficiently carry out the most productive social media presence for  private operators and their respective traveler community, economic development agencies, and hospitality partners.

Social Flights offers:

• Syndication of Social Flights blog articles
• Unique blog contents specific to your operation and community.
• Cross linkages with other operators, tourism boards, hospitality, and corporate business centers
• Strategic Twitter campaigns, Facebook pages, G+, press release support, and cross posting with sister cities
• Package formation with festivals, recreation, conventions, and events; locally and across North America
• Cooperative marketing with sister city operators.

Social Flights draws on our unique experience in ride sharing systems and yield management for private aircraft inventory. Social Flights uses up-to-the-minute social media techniques to organize communities around available private aircraft capacity, public charter opportunities, and empty leg fulfillment.

Social Flights draws from our national databases of event organizers, universities, corporate clusters, and diverse industries allowing us to help you identify, influence, and match supply and demand for private air service priced on a per-seat basis.   This allows travelers to form a true comparison of the “time-value” of private air service versus commercial air service.

Finally, we also provide you with ways to spot opportunities that commercial airlines simply cannot serve at any price.

Please consider adding Social Flights Services to your marketing mix.   Give us a call for a free strategy session and let’s see where we can integrate your air service operation with the entire national travel services industry.

Social Flights will soon release Part 2 of the Operators Whitepaper.  Part 1 identified the intrinsic value of private aviation to a travel market.  Part 2 will identify some of the technology challenges of integrating with the mainstream travel community.

In short, the next step for private aviation is to integrate with the mainstream market while offering seamless transition with other technologies and transportation modes. The following is a summary of Part 2.

The Technology Challenge

Technology is encroaching on every aspect of the travel industry from on-line travel agencies to Next Generation Air Traffic Management.  It is no longer sufficient to have a great looking website, the data that private operators collects and distributes must be compatible with all other services that support the customer long before and long after they cross your threshold.

Compatibility of Pricing

One example is in compatibility of pricing; private airplanes are priced by the flight-hours imposed on a private aircraft. However,  commercial airplanes are priced by the market availability of seats.  There is no way for the customer to compare these two travel options; as such, these markets are segmented by price incompatibility.  The trend is increasing through the unbundling of services like baggage fees and check in fees and convenience fees, hotel, and car rentals contracts, discount coupons, etc.

True Value / Time Value

A vastly neglected aspect of travel is called True Value. For example; the cost of traveling to a hub airport often exceeds the cost of the airline ticket.  The time waiting for TSA screening and connecting flights often exceeds the in-route flight time.  The total transit time often exceeds the time that the traveler needs to be at the location.  Weekend travel is impossible without extra hotel stays and missing one or two days of work.  Time is money.  Lost opportunity is money. Life is short.

Alternate Technologies

Alternate technologies such as mobile connectivity and social media drive different migration patters of people, business and entertainment. Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, and Google offer alternate ways for people to communicate in lieu of travel, but they also expose more people to more places that are less accessible by commercial aviation.

The Integration

Today, the travel market is segmented in information silos where companies hoard information in the name of competitive advantage.  However, when prices are comparable, the market can apply a time/value formula where alternate technologies enhance the value of travel.  Then, and only then can the entire door-to-door travel experience can be fully integrated in an efficient market where everyone playing the travel game shares information, combines services, and collaborate in the best interest of the customer.

It’s a game, let’s have fun

Every industry from agriculture to retail to energy production experiences unsellable merchandise.  Losses may be due to spoilage or theft or the inability to sell product within a certain expiration date – this is the case for empty legs.

Excess inventory is usually steeply discounted or written off as a loss. Costs that cannot be recovered are passed on to the customer.  If the customer “penalty” is too high, the demand shrinks and unsellable merchandise increases – This forces a contraction in the industry where demand can drive prices up further.

Suppose we know that the existing market for private travel can sustain $1.20 per seat mile price point such that an 8-seat airplane costs $10,000.00 to travel 1000 miles plus an empty return flight. Now suppose that the price per seat mile could be reduced to $.60 by sharing the plane with 16 people (8 in each direction)?  Would cutting the price in half effectively double the  number of people who could afford private travel?

Half empty or half full…or Both

We could certainly draw a line on a graph that would represent how market size would shift if we floated the value between $1.20 and $.60 per seat mile?  We can achieve this through any combination of inbound and outbound passengers between 8 and 16.

Social Flights is building a platform that can pool empty leg inventory by consolidating data provided by hundreds of operators.  The same platform can be used by communities to pool likely passengers attending events, sporting games, corporation travelers,  and conference attendees.  The same platform will be used to match the supply to the demand on a national level.  With a large enough system, it should no longer matter if it is an empty leg or a primary leg – all legs are primary.

The ability to salvage empty seat inventory while lowering costs for all seats will increase the size of the market for private jet services. The aircraft can fly more revenue miles per month in a larger market instead of remaining stationary waiting for a smaller market of passengers.  The airplane can deliver a higher net revenue per mile when both legs are full and priced correctly than when priced at cost-plus.

With Social Flights, operators can increase their volumes by lowering primary prices and adding return leg revenue. Owners will favor a operator that can deliver the highest utilization of their aircraft. Operators can now challenge brokers with a competitive alternate market for private service.  Travelers can now challenge the commercial airlines for service and time value.  At the end of the day, those who share information will have a competitive advantage over those who hoard information.

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: