Plane Conversations

I first discovered Keith Johnson’s blog, PlannerWire.net  starting with his article 13 Event Industry Blogs and Sites That You Should Check Out. Last July he updated the list to 44 event industry blogs that are important.  It it just too hard to resist not publishing the list he compiled.  Below (after a few of my comments) please find the best event planner blogs on the Internet, by Keith Johnson.

Why is an aviation company like Social Flights interested in event planners?

Nobody ever suggests that UAL or Alaska Airlines would ever ask anyone who intends to stay on the ground that day what their opinion is regarding airline service.  Airlines are too busy to worry about what happens before and after their clients board their planes.   The airlines are in the business of filling seats so why would they care about the communities whose collective posteriors occupy the spaces in between the lines on their balance sheets?

Maybe that’s the problem with airlines.

Social Flights has every intention to understand the needs of the travelers for whom we provide air service.  We exist because the communities we serve tell us to exist.  Communities of travelers tell us where to fly and when to fly.  They tell us how many people they need to arrive at any geographic point in North America and how many people to depart from any point.  Without event planners, there is no reason to travel.  Think about that for a moment.

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 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.

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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!

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.

I often feel “Lost” as I continuously review what is happening in the air transportation industry. So many people are stranded in time and place by the anxieties, harassment, and limitation the air transportation system.  It is only getting worse as airlines push in and pull out of markets with abandon disrupting the dreams and aspirations of millions of people with the stroke of keyboard.

Or, perhaps it is the holiday season now upon us that leads me along the nostalgic trail of family and friends who I miss so dearly. Or, it could be the recession that forces me to look outside my own community to achieve economic security in these difficult times. Meanwhile; social media technology increases my exposure to like minded people, new ideas, and a bewildering array of events and opportunities – many of which I can no longer access efficiently.

The easy thing to do would be to accomodate the situation and limit my goals and aspirations to that which others serve up to me on the platter of their choice.  I could simply give up and be content with my lot in life as determined by others.  I could dedicate my talent, education, and experience to lesser parochial tasks that happen along the jungle trail.

Or, I can seek the vulnerabilities of the forces that control my ability to travel.  I can exploit weaknesses in their business model and I can find others willing to join forces to bypass those externalities altogether.

I have chosen the latter and in the process, I have met some of the smartest, engaging, and interesting people that I could have imagined.  I no longer flash back to the past – I flash forward to the future.  That is the secret ingredient to never being stranded in the choices of others.

2012 will be the tipping point for many people. I believe that communities will begin to organize around the assets that government and corporations can no longer provide.  Communities will make the choices that determine their own future, sanctity, and preservation.  Self-organization will become the fabric of the social landscape.

My job it to show people that there is no reason why they cannot run their own airline; any where and any time they choose.

Few people get on a commercial airplane to enjoy the fine food, friendly conversation and sensational view – but that may change as KLM continues to innovate in social media.  Some may remember that KLM was the first to provide on-demand service from Europe to Miami booked entirely through social media.

This time, KLM is banking on the fact that people who have both an origin city and a destination city in common, would have other things in common as well. KLM observes that people share information with each other so freely on social media- so maybe they’ll share information with each other on “Social Airlines”.

Will something get lost in the translation between the virtual and the reality? Fortunately, Anne van den Berg was kind enough to provide Social Flights with a translation of her Dutch language blog,  Editor Anne Daily:

You always have to wait and see who will sit next to you on an airplane. A crying kid or a smelly man, it is not always fun. Soon, this can be in the past. The Dutch airline company KLM will be offering seating suggestions based on someone’s Twitter or Facebook account. The goal, says an executive from KLM, is letting, mainly business, passengers network. I am very curious how this will work. 

Well, we are asking the same questions at Social Flights.  In fact we are attempting to fill small aircraft on direct flights based on a similar assumption that people of like interests would choose to share an airplane together.  While the KLM starts with a full plane and sorts people by interests, Social Flights hopes to go one step further and use such data to “kickstart” scheduled “flash Charter Jet” service.  So while KLM sees an important branding advantage, Social Flights sees and entirely new paradigm for air transportation – public Charter Jets.

Anne van den Berg continues with the following analysis:

- What kind of customers are you serving? I wonder, what customer are waiting for this service? Personally, I like having some conversations with my neighbour in an airplane, but, mainly when I return from a trip, I want to sleep. Nó contact. If someone will come and sit next to me with the expectation of discussing the state of the world in a highly intellectual manner, it is very probable he will be deceived. 

- And what about privacy? I expect that customers will have to do an opt-in, but do you want to give everybody insight in who you are? If you put your Twitter information out there, sure that is public already, but Facebook? That is mainly meant for family and friends (although some people will stretch that definition). 

KLM has since disclosed in this CNN article that mutual acceptance to use the social seating tool will be required. KLM was quick to note that the intention is not to create a dating game and they did not disclose if they would charge an extra fee for the service. Further, they they did mention adding any amenities in support of the friendship event.

This leaves me wondering what the implications of being “unfriended” in virtual space and reality space at the edge of physical space.  In any case, Social Flights will be watching KLM developments actively. Thanks Anne for the tip and translation on this story – let’s share a flight sometime.