Archive for the ‘Jay Deragon’ Category:
Time Value Experience Is The New Luxury
Social flights continues to grow as our users finding new ways to integrate private jet service into their experience travel itinerary. As with most early adopters, there is a larger vision driving their actions – it’s not to be “first on the block” to experience private travel. They are the “first OFF the block” in a new form of luxury; The Time Value Experience.
Luxury does not mean the same thing for everyone and this poses a challenge for brands and product designers. The top tier brands are learning that 45-55 year old who make up a large portion of their markets have a different set of standards when it comes to travel.
Instead of wanting to be pampered with exquisite and precision service, the new generation of luxury travel is seeking value, authenticity, and uniqueness. They want local experiences, not a duplicate of their home in a new place.
“Value Based Driven”
via Young, affluent travelers disavow luxury defined by older generation – Travel Weekly.
Ellen Bettridge, vice president of American Express Retail Travel Network, told agents and hoteliers attending the 2011 International Luxury Travel Market conference in Cannes, France, last month. “They just know more. Everything’s at their fingertips.”
Knowing your customer’s preferences and accommodating those preferences are two different things in hi-end travel. Creating “value” is not easy, it takes a lot of work, planning, and technical knowledge as well as follow-up and community management. Unique experiences, by definition, don’t come with instructions for the service provider. Competition, by definition, attacks the uniqueness of your service. Alternatives to your service are as easy for competitors to market as for you.
One of the best ways to achieve uniqueness is to use your brand to integrate with other experience services – a local competitor may not be a competitor after all. Think about Disneyland; Mickie Mouse does not compete with Pirates of the Caribbean, rather, they are integrated into the whole grand experience.
If your guests will come for one 2 days, they are more likely to stay for 4 than return for another 2. Then, they are more likely to return if they haven’t “done the whole park”. If they become comfortable with a place, they will return over and over forming new family traditions that they can identify with and share with their friends…..
Chris Sanderson, co-founder of the Future Laboratory, a London-based brand-marketing firm, asserted, “It’s not about ‘fly and flop.’ It’s about ‘find and seek.’” What makes serving this group tricky is that agents can’t fall back on tried-and-true brands, at least when it comes to accommodations.
Social Flight is capable and available to serve any community by providing operations in public charter and private charter with modern turbine aircraft. We have a growing clientele of vacation and resort communities banding together and taking control of the tourist experience instead of depending on outside airlines, charter operators, or tour organizers to do it for them. Make the “Time Value Experience” your Brand image and make Social Flights your airline.
What Google’s Flight Search Is Missing
People are accusing Google of using it’s vast coverage and near universal brand to take unfair advantage of the “search and sell” industrial complex. When people type in; “San Diego to Charlotte Flights”, Google instantly provides the cheapest flights for that search criteria.
Google also provides a handy link for “more Google results…” After that, lesser aggregators such as Expedia and Kayak appear lower on the page. Of course, the vanquished can pay Google a fee for the benefits that any advertiser would gain…
Who is anti-competitive against whom?
So is Google engaging in anti-competitive behavior, after all, they are both the judge and the jury on who shows up where on your screens? Well, maybe not, all they are doing is “intercepting” general search inquiries with their own products. It’s awkward, but not necessarily illegal or anti-competitive since Google provides links directly to the airline site and does not book the seats on their own site like Expedia or Orbitz.
On the other hand, airlines pay travel sites 11 dollars for a booking that would otherwise cost them only 1 dollar through their own site – they prefer the Google hit over the travel site hit. Furthermore, travel booking sites rely on Google for 20% of their business so any slide in ranking means real money is sliding down with it – so they hate it. The airlines love it because it gets the traveler off the third party sites where stickiness is a rumor at best. All of this friction is worth 17 billion dollars per year – friction removed from a system is obviously in the best interest of the consumer, Right?
Ref Google’s Flight Search Sparks Antitrust Fears |.
The thing that everyone is missing is that none of the current players in online travel agency businesses are aware of a significant opportunity within the private aviation space. The Google quotations are made on a dollar ranking not a “Time/Service” metric. It remains extremely easy for an airline to game the ranking by hiding fees outside the fare quotation. It is also easy for the airline to underprice a few seats to pull the customer on to their site where they block out the better seats.
So, what is the opportunity are we talking about in private aviation at Social Flights?
- Aggregating open seats available on more than 15,000 private aircraft flying everywhere
- Making these seats available and transparent to the public for purchase as an alternative to the broken and anti-social commercial air service
- Enabling fliers to self aggregate and for direct flights from communities with no service to destinations they have in common
- Lowering the cost of private aviation by selling unused or under utilized assets, open seats
The Travel Market Races To The Bottom
There is a war brewing within the on-line travel agency space over Google’s recent move with Google Flights and Google Hotels.
Google began positioning its new flight-finding feature at the top of general search results for airline booking information earlier this month. And its new competitors in the $110 billion online travel industry aren’t happy about the search giant crashing the party, according to a recent Wall Street Journal report.
Chasing The Market To The Bottom
Travel is hot for 2012 and beyond. An increasing number of people say they’ll do more leisure traveling in the coming year, and even more say they’ll fly if they can find good deals in 2012. Good deals are going to be hard to find. The airlines attempted to raise prices 22 times in 2011 (and nine of those attempts were successful).
Business travel spend is expected to have grown 6.9% in 2011 compared to 2010, hitting $250.2 billion. The forecast for 2012 is 4.3% growth in business travel spend for 2012 (or $260.9 billion).
While revenue growth in the travel sector looks promising the user experience continues to decline. Flying today is like traveling by bus with few frills and even fewer fun times. Consider some of the recent headlines:
- Airline Technology Leading to Customer Alienation
- Airlines Score Lowest In Customer Satisfaction
- 92% of Executive Unhappy With Business Travel Experiences
I could go on with an endless list but by now the picture should be obvious. Current market dynamics within air travel services is propelling a race to the bottom and Google knows this. In other words air travel suppliers have boxed themselves into competing on price and thus air travel services have become a commodity. The meaning of the term commodity is used to describe a service for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market.
Google knows that search has the greatest influence over consumer choices for travel services. 93% of people who seek information on travel services use search. Consumers seek ratings and reviews, news articles, word of mouth and blog post which in the end influences their decisions. When there is little differential in a market then price becomes the initial decision factor followed by “social influences”, i.e. quality of the experience.
As a result, the present online travel bazaar is very competitive and the margins are shrinking . The tight competition led the market to compete on price rather than experience. Google recognizes this and simply stepped in and made the shopping experience better. Google doesn’t care about the price of air service they care about providing the price to consumers seamlessly.
As fortunes are made by leveraging technology to become ever more efficient, there is yet far greater wealth to be had by unleashing the discovery of new experiences and creation of new opportunities. That is exactly why we created Social Flights.
The Intangible Value of Air Transportation
Many experts estimate that only 20% of economic impact is measured in financial value – rather, most of it is measured in intangible value. The work of visionaries in the areas of Intangible Value and the value of social networks are able to articulate value far beyond that which can be counted with money. Suppose these principles could be applied not only to corporations, but also to communities sharing an asset such as an airport?
In the race to defend valuable assets from the fiscal cutting room floor, communities are increasingly trying to define themselves in terms of shared community assets from schools to parks museums and even airports.
From: Worcester Telegram & Gazette – telegram.com.
State officials released a study yesterday saying that Worcester Regional Airport is a boon to the local economy, even though the airport has struggled for years and offers charter service through just one carrier. The study released by the Department of Transportation said the airport supports 418 jobs and has an annual economic benefit to the tune of $51.4 million.
The Intangible Value Drivers include the following questions for corporations, but this also applies to any community sharing a set of assets. From Mary Adams from her recent book Intangible Capital, she asks:
- How do you get paid (the key revenue categories on your income statement)? (strategic capital)
- What are the processes and knowledge/data that drive this revenue? (structural capital)
- What are the competencies that your people need to support this business model? (human capital)
- What are the key external relationships that make this model work? (relationship capital)
Apply these intangible principles to any community:
A community gets paid by their collective productivity – this is their strategic capital. In order to be productive, communities need access to markets and resources that support their productivity. The structural capital of a community includes their social processes and knowledge assets but also, their access to knowledge assets and data (stored value) of other communities. The community counts human capital in the skills that they collectively hold; entrepreneurs, trades, and social services, and education for example. Finally, strong and weak relationship capital includes the internal social fabric but also their external connections and associations.
All of these Intangible factors are directly tied to the ability for a community to travel and be traveled to. As such, travel assets, by definition, always return 80% ROI. If you lose one of them, you lose the other three.
The Massachusetts State Study found that overall the state’s 39 airports combined support more than 124,000 jobs and generate $11.9 billion in economic output annually.
If 80% of the value is in intangibles, one can argue that Worchester Regional is worth 250 Million and all 39 Massachusetts airports are worth 55 Billion in intangible economic output. The real connection being missed is the difference between the economic value that cannot be accounted for in existing service models. $250 Million dollars is a lot of air transportation for a region that always generates 80% ROI.
What many peoples fail to realize is the possibility that a community can operate their own airline. The regionalization of air service pioneered by Social Flights is a new concept that allows communities to own and operate one or more aircraft maintaining control over the schedules and locations where the aircraft flies.