Plane Conversations

The beginning of online travel created new business models that changed the dynamics and relationships with buyers.  Now with the advent of social technology the dynamics are changing again.

instead of the traditional travel site being the brand the brand has become the traveler.

As a result, the present online travel bazaar has become a race to become more social. Technology and savvy buyers have dramatically changed online travel over the past two years. The app market, for instance, has swelled from virtually nothing to billions of dollars in just a few years, and smartphone owners love their access to a gaggle of Wi-Fi finders, flight status updaters, local restaurant finders, budget booking assistants, translators and more.

Websites offering unique travel-oriented services have made a strong showing, too. They include Wanderfly, a personalized travel recommendation travel engine à la Hunch and Pandora; and GTrot, a site that allows travelers to share their itineraries with friends and get travel advice within their networks.

Applications like these will continue to grow, improving the efficiency of the overall industry by improving the connectivity of air travel information between flights and friends.

Chasing the Lowest Common Denominator

While on-line applications enable travelers to connect and collaborate, few if any do anything to improve the travel experience. Commercial airline travel experiences are abysmal and getting worse. While the efficiency of commercial air travel for consumers and businesses has diminished could there be a better alternative emerging?

Social technology will not enhance the value of on-line travel sites enough to improve pricing.  Social technology has become a “must be” rather than a differentiator and it, by itself, doesn’t change the lowest common denominator, price.  Finding “best” prices has become easy given the power of search and the recent introduction of Google Flights.  Finding the best experience and the highest value has become difficult but may change soon.

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Ancient writers often referred to two types of time: kairos time and chronos time.  Chronos is linear time and measures things in a sequence.  First this, then that.  Kairos time can be loosely defined as the “right” time or the “opportune” time.  Think of it this way, if you stand over home plate and repeatedly swing a baseball bat in regular intervals, you are participating in a chronos event.  If, however, you wait and swing just as the baseball crosses the plate and make solid contact that sends the ball over the left field fence, you have just participated in a kairos moment.

In your business, which type of time do you prefer?

At Corporate Flight Management our motto is “Time Creates Opportunity”.  But it isn’t just any time.  It is kairos time that creates the opportunity.  Private corporate aviation can create this opportunity for you and your business.  It is about being in the right place at the right time, whether that is closing a critical deal or being home in time for that important family event.

If you’re trying to achieve this with the airlines, you’re stuck in their time –chronos time.  And you know that it is anything but opportune and eminently frustrating.  The good news is that there is an alternative to the norm of airline travel and it is far more available and affordable than you might imagine.

Corporate aviation can help you and your company manage the one resource you simply can’t create more of: time.   When you are able to manage your time and your company’s time more efficiently and cost-effectively, you generate many more kairos moments.

Don’t just swing and hope the bat connects.  Be in the right place, at the right time and swing for the fence.

After all, “Time Creates Opportunity.”

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In a recent post I commented on the study that claims delays in the airline industry costs US travelers 33 billion dollars a year in lost productivity.

Yesterday I made a small contribution to the 33 billion of lost productivity on a flight from New York back home to Nashville.

One of my business partners and I had business in Danbury and Norwalk Connecticut over a two day period. In putting the trip itinerary together it made sense to fly into New York (LGA) on Southwest, rent a car, do the multiple meetings, and then fly home the morning of the third day.

The day started with a 7am departure from the hotel in Norwalk with about a 50 mile drive to LaGuardia. We left early to avoid the worst of traffic coming into the city. The traffic was not too bad so we got to the rental car drop off at 9am and ended up at the terminal and clearing through security by 945am.   

The flight, scheduled to depart at 1135, ended up being 30 minutes late on the inbound arrival due to weather in the NY area. The weather was just some light rain and cloud cover. Nothing major, but IFR conditions nonetheless.

After boarding, the aircraft pulled way from the gate and got in line for a 45 minute wait for departure. More delay due to IFR spacing issues for landing and departing traffic.

We had to connect in Baltimore with a plane change but missed the connection due to late arrival. There was another flight to Nashville departing 40 minutes after our arrival so we rushed over to that departure gate to find out the flight was oversold. We were then put on standby for a fully booked flight 2 hours later. Reduced capacity in the airline system translates to high load factors and profit for the airlines but major inconvenience for the passenger when connections get missed.

During this process we found out that 15 of the New York passengers on the first leg were Nashville bound and all of them, like us, missed their connection in BWI.

Fortunately we were the last two passengers to get on the flight to Nashville. It was about 30 minutes late departing because it had arrived late into BWI due to weather in the Northeast.  

While boarding we walked by several very frustrated Nashville bound New Yorkers who were not so lucky.

Arriving into Nashville and retrieving bags, we were out of the Nashville Airport about 630pm. The drive home from BNA is about an hour for me so the door to door travel time from the hotel in Norwalk to the house was 13.5 hours.

On the GPS navigator that trip door to door is about 900 miles driving. Based on the drive miles we averaged 70 miles per hour door to door.

I have no complaints about Southwest Airlines. Their service was good as always. They don’t control weather and air traffic flow. The gate agents did an excellent job handling the passengers, some who were not so pleasant.  

My story could be told by millions of travelers. It happens every day in the system. All you need is a little rain and low cloud ceilings in the Northeast  and the log jam begins. It doesn’t unwind until the last aircraft hit their overnight destinations.

We have a Cirrus SR-22 available to us to fly for business. Had we taken the Cirrus we could have reduced that hotel to home travel time down to about 6.5 hours. This doesn’t account for the fact that we could have done the whole trip in two days instead of three by flying on our own schedule.

Next time I think I will fly myself and spend a few dollars more on using the Cirrus than the cost of airline tickets and the exrta hotel.

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An economy is defined by, or limited by, time and productivity. Value is created in an economy when an improved use of the resource of time creates gain in productivity.

The purpose of travel by aircraft is to gain time over other means of travel, time that can be used to create new value.

Inside the experience of travel the journey itself can either add to or subtract from productivity. If I can be productive while traveling I gain value during the travel in addition to the gains on both ends of the journey.

Every day, those of us in business aviation, witness the gains in productivity both in time saved and in the positive experience of travel by private and business aircraft.

Business travelers who have experienced this form of travel know what I am talking about.

Business travelers who use the airlines will testify to the negative impact on productivity from the time drain and wear and tear of airline travel.

The airlines, and the system they have created around the hub and spoke, have done a lot to try and ease the journey by creating nice terminals with food, shopping, and wifi connections to the Internet.  However, am I more productive sitting at the Airport Starbucks on my laptop for three hours waiting on the connecting flight, or being at my destination three hours earlier?

What about the time en-route?

If I can conduct a meeting in the air with clients, vendors or fellow workers what’s it worth?

When is the last time you had a business meeting while traveling on an airline in coach class or even in business class?

Business aviation wins hands down both in time saved in the journey and productivity experienced during the journey.

So why doesn’t everyone travel using a business aircraft?

Price and perceived value!

Business aviation is expensive when compared to the perceived value.

If our industry created a true cost-productivity calculator application that took into consideration not only the value of the time savings, but just importantly the productivity gains experienced during the journey, would it change the perception of the value of business aviation?

The technology is here today to do this.  

I would challenge our friends in the tech sector to come up with an application that calculates the “true costs” of the various modes of air travel.

What would an application like that be worth to those of us in Business Aviation?

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Airlines are trying to make a profit; something that has not happened in aggregate in their entire history of serving the traveling public. In an effort to make a profit in the past few years they have unbundled their pricing and added fees back in for everything imaginable.

I can’t blame them for trying to make profit. Profit is not a bad word. 

But somehow this whole idea of  add-on fees is having an anti-social effect on the traveling public. Mainstream media has spent a great deal of space on this issue.  The latest comes from the New York Times in an article titled “Airline Fees Test Travelers’ Limits”. 

You can almost feel sorry for the airlines because it seems at every turn they are getting kicked by either the government or the media. And the more kicking they do, the more the public demands a change. It is almost to a point where we feel that we have a fundamental right to travel cheaply by air and without problems. I don’t remember seeing this in the Constitution, but you never know. An amendment dealing with airline travel may be forthcoming.     

Congress thinks they can solve it by putting more rules (laws) in place to regulate everything from how you advertise your rates to how long you can keep a person stranded on an aircraft sitting on the tarmac. How can you regulate customer service?   

 I wonder if there is a point where the airlines figure this out?  The solutions are neither simple nor obvious because the airlines must make a profit.  At this point, though, they don’t seem to have a vision of how they can create both profits and happy customers.

 We run a business that offers an alternative form of travel. It is not cheap, but travelers do like to travel in our aircraft. 

Most days we have happy customers. Occasionally we make a mistake or weather and the laws of mechanical physics conspire against us and we end up with an unhappy customer. The air conditioner breaks on the hottest of days or weather prevents us from departing or making an on time arrival or …..

 When that happens, it is up to us to make it right. We should do what it takes to fix it. If we don’t make it right, then shame on us. Those customers who see you do the right thing when things go wrong become the best customers. When you don’t do the right thing, then the customers go somewhere else for the solution.  

Our customers are smart and successful people. They run businesses themselves and know what it takes to deliver their product or service at a profit while meeting the expectations of their customers. They also know that things can sometimes go wrong; so, mostly, I have seen a degree of patience from our customers to allow us to “make it right.”

I don’t see that with the airlines. Patience has run out. As the NYT article title suggests “travelers’ limits are tested”.

One side of me smiles and says I hope that the airlines keep doing more of what they are doing. It pushes people to consider using our form of air travel even though the dollar cost is more.

The other side of me says that the airlines need to figure out how to make their customers happy if at all possible.  The economy of this country will win if they do that.

The bottom line is that travel is about productivity. Efficient travel contributes to economic productivity and inefficient travel kills productivity. Stress in travel has to reduce productivity, too.  Let’s figure out how to eliminate the stress.

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I have a proposition for you.  How about you climb into an aluminum tube and go hurtling through the air at 500 miles an hour?  How about you have no control over who you sit next to for several hours and how about you pay several hundred dollars for the experience?  Not so much, right?

Then, why do people take air mass-transit? Why do they spend the money to go through the experience – sometimes pleasant and at other times very frustrating – of boarding an aircraft to go somewhere? Why not go by another means of transportation like automobile or bus or train? Why even go at all?

I know this sounds like a dumb question because the answer should be obvious.

Of course, the purpose of travel is to go see someone or something, perhaps to experience something new or perhaps to build a business or personal relationship. We have some goal that we cannot accomplish at home; so, unless we can bring the destination to us, we have to travel to get there.

When we get past the whys of travel and get to the methods, things get a little hazier.

Why do people travel by airline? I have to believe that people chose to go by air because they value their time.  They believe that air travel will help them make the best use of their time, allowing them to spend more of it at their destination and less of it getting there.  That makes sense since aircraft are faster than cars or trains or buses, right?  In theory, yes.  In reality, often, no.

Once, traveling by air was perhaps the most glamorous and efficient way to travel.  Airlines served our purpose of getting there faster.  Are they still serving that purpose?

All of the evidence suggests that each year they take a little longer to get us there. In other words, airline travel is slowing down – not speeding up - as a mode of travel. Airline travel is losing efficiency and is falling further and further short of fulfilling its purpose. 

In an economy that is driven by constant demands for increased productivity, is it any wonder that the market is unwilling to pay the airlines a profitable price for their service?

Now, in defense of the airline industry, they do not have total control over the efficiency of their service. Since airlines have been targeted by terrorists more  than every other form of transportation, the industry is subject to the government’s ability to provide security to the traveling public.  Airlines are also subject to constraints in the traffic flow system – the freeways in the air are clogged and the technology to increase traffic flow has not kept up with the demand. In essence, we are trying to push big city traffic through a two-lane highway. We have the technology; but, we haven’t built the new eight lane freeway the traffic volume requires.

So, the  problems that reduce the efficiency of the air transportation system are not for the airlines to solve alone. All of the stakeholders in the game must figure it out.  

For airlines to be a viable part of the future transportation system, the problems must be solved. Otherwise, our economy will be to unable to reap the full benefits of new innovation and increases in productivity.

The sooner the better, if this economy is to sustain long-term growth.

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Recently, I had the opportunity to travel to Illinois for a business trip which I parlayed into a mini high school reunion (thank you, Facebook); to Denver, Colorado, to evaluate the conditon and value of a fleet of aircraft; to Orlando, Florida, for a convention and to visit family; and, finally, to Puerto Rico and Florida for business (just business!…right!) 

While I’ve not had the pleasure of living in any other country in the world other than the United States, I still have an appreciation for the freedoms that we enjoy, as if I’ve had to live without them.  Do you relish the freedom we have to travel, or are you caught up in the frustration and inconvenience of it?  Now be honest.  After all, it’s just you and me talking here.  Tell the truth, does the slow, clueless driver in the left lane make you nuts? Does a child kicking your seat from Birmingham to Seattle drive you around the bend? I absolutely believe that we should have expectations and judge our travel service providers based on what we pay and relative to their promises.  But, do you realize the unprecedented ability we have to get from point A to B?  Let’s look at the airlines and how they do it. 

I’ll never forget the Delta Air Lines advertising tag line of the mid 1980s - Delta Gets You There. This was one of the most honest advertising campaigns that I can recall.  They did not claim to get you there on time, happy, on the same day or the same month that you departed!  They didn’t promise that you would arrive with your luggage or that you would make your connections!  There was no promise not to trap you on the ramp for hours without air conditioning, smile at you, feed you, or even suggest that you might want to fly Delta again!  Just that, “hey, whaddyawant?…we get you there don’t we?”  Well, guess what. I can walk, ride my bike, drive or ride my unicycle and “get there”. (Okay, I used to ride a unicycle and still believe after 20 years and I still can…so please just roll with me here.)  My point is that we should expect more from the airlines.  It seems to me that we just take whatever they throw at us. 

At the moment I’m at 36,000 feet on a high profile airline that shall remain nameless (okay, I’ll only say that they are an AMERICAN airline).  And just moments ago I witnessed two flight attendants having a little “spat”.  Nothing instills more confidence in me than overhearing a disagreement between two people whose main purpose is to work as a team to help save my bacon in the event of an emergency.

Here’s what I believe: It’s okay to have expectations of being treated like a human rather than a quiet and helpless zoo animal when you ride the airlines.  Realistically, however, aren’t you just setting yourself up for frustration?  Really, I want you to help me out and answer here.

I think that we should relax, leave early, bring a book, an iPod, the Xanex and demand more, but be realistic about what the airlines are able and willing to deliver.  Appreciate the travel freedoms that we enjoy but keep them in context.  It will keep you calmer, happier and help you appreciate the opportunities that we experience within the boundaries of the airlines’ limited desire to satisfy over their desire for profit.

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