Plane Conversations

Social Flights is featuring this property sharing opportunity from AirBnB.com and it’s owner to present a unique way to visit the Olympic Peninsula and the Olympic National Park in the State of Washington. This is the first time we’ve done this because it is a great way to demonstrate the versatility of Private Social Travel.

Cinnamon Bear Cabin is walking distance to the (semi) private and uncrowded Lake Cushman Golf Course and within a few miles of three amazing bodies of water; Lake Cushman, Lake Kokanee, and the Hood Canal (actually a Fjord remnant of the ice ages).  Hood Canal is known for crystal clear saltwater scuba diving, crabbing, clam digging and seasonal salmon fishing.  Lake Cushman is a 4000 acre  glacier fed lake at the foot of 7000 ft mount Washington in the Olympic Range.  Lake Kokanee sits below the Lake Cushman dam and offers a serene  trout fishing experience through its meandering canyons.

The nearest commercial airport is 2 hours away, but Social Flights can bring you and your group directly into Sanderson Field in a private aircraft from anywhere in the US, less than 15 minutes from this very special location where you will pick up your car, keys, and license for fun and adventure.

Olympic National Park is comprised of nearly 1 million acres of the Olympic Mountain range. The Olympics literally halted the glaciers that carved the surrounding geography many thousands of years ago and are now home to unique species and wildlife ecosystems.  The ONP is one of the last remaining temperate rain forests in the World with ancient old growth featuring trees of astonishing size.  Yes we all know of the great sequoias of California, but Imagine cedars, douglas firs, sitka spruce, and hemlock trees 15 ft in diameter and up to 300 feet tall.

Indian heritage is alive and dominant in several areas offering cultural and recreational opportunities found nowhere else.  You can also visit Lake Quinault, The Western shores, and many hot spring locations all easily accessible from Cinnamon Bear Cabin.  In the Northern portion of ONP, you’ll find crystal clear Crescent Lake - a body of water so rare and so old that it’s the home of some species of fishes that exist nowhere else on Earth. Crescent Lake is called a “National Treasure” with 5 stars on TripAdvisor.com

Hiking, camping, Kayaking, festivals, casinos, local artisans, scuba diving, golfing, fishing, sky diving, are all abundant in the Olympic Peninsula.  What you will not find are crowds, tourist traps, tourist crime, pollution, blight, traffic, and harassment.  The Olympic Peninsula has one of the lowest population densities in the US. Local prices are local prices and not tourist prices.  Cinnamon Bear Cabin is perfect for people who want to experience the best of the Pacific Northwest without needing a vacation from their vacation afterwards.

The choice is yours, you can navigate the Gauntlet of the travel industry whose sole purpose is to drive revenue, add fees, sell advertising impressions, waste your time, and reach into your wallet at every fork and bend  on the roads most traveled. Or, you can go for a private experience with all the cherished memories that you expect for your time and money at a cost that is comparable to anything that the commercial travel “processing” industry has to offer. It’s about a colors of time for your money, not the colors of money for your time. You live once, make it count

Investment in travel applications continues. Social Flights continues to track the convergence of these technologies and demonstrate where we fit into the new travel paradigm. This article features Gidsy.com, the “activity-booker-meets-social-networking” site - claimed to be the AirBnB of travel. Notably they are location in Berlin (not the Valley), and their lead investor is none other than @AplusK.

screen shot from Gidsy.com

Venture capitalist tend to invest in businesses that they understand and businesses that they can influence.  Ashton Kutcher is well known for his influence in both old media and new media – but where is the connection between that and travel?…except that Ashton needs to travel to get to Berlin.  Perhaps herein lies the answer.

From  VentureVillage.

“What I love about Gidsy is that they are creating a movement and a strong, credible community of likeminded people,” said supporter Felix Petersen in an interview with VentureVillage. “It’s important that like-minded businesses and individuals in Berlin cross-invest and help each other out.”

On the other hand (from the same article)

Kutcher has invested in over 40 tech companies to date, some of which remain unnamed out of fear that his own publicity would overshadow the product itself. 

How important is access to information?

Access to locations and access to information about location is critical to both the success of the people who live there as well as the people who go there.  In this light, products like Gidsy take on new meaning and impact for communities and travelers.

Gidsy.com allows users to offer paid-for activities and courses to other members of the community, as well as full social networking integration. Initially launched for the Berlin area, Gidsy now covers Amsterdam, New York and San Francisco, with London to follow soon.  Gidsy’s business model (charging 10% of each transaction) differs from similar US services like SideTour in NY (which charges a higher 20%) and Vayable (available in six cities, charging a 15% fee).  How they will hold up against American competition is yet to be seen.

The Virtuous Circle

Basically, Gidsy allows people to book activities provided by real people.  After listening to a recent program of TrendPOV by Dr. Amy Vanderbilt and her guest Reinhold Behringer about Augmented Reality, Gidsy.com seems to create the underlying dataset to this next level of travel technology.  The ability to point your smartphone down a street and see what activities are happening is only an iPhone revision away. Proximity is a play on “location” and inherently invokes transportation. So it is easy to see that many applications and technologies are converging.

Back to Ashton Kutcher and travel

Airlines and airplanes are increasingly confined to major hub airports.  Because everything is scheduled and booked far in advance, there is relatively little richness to the data that would drive an augmented reality experience in an airport.  However, where schedules are fluid, and activities are localized, and people are being creative, new markets will inevitably emerge.

Not Trivial:

Social Flights provides the dataset and certification to publish flights out of smaller local airports with the flexibility of flying non-stop to other small airports.  Combined applications such as Gidsy, augmented reality, and Social Flights can open up a new world of travel opportunities.  Maybe the “Hollywood Augmented Reality” is not so far off the mark after all.

Amazing new innovations continue to appear in the travel segment.  This is understandable.  When a person leaves their home, all the things that a home provides can now be offered up as a product. From sleeping comfort, to safety, to community; “home-on-the-road” is big business.

Planning a trip is getting easier and faster.  The problem is that there are so many options available that YOUR best options rarely appear in the first few pages of a Google Search.  Increasingly, the traveler needs to interface with someone who really knows your “home-on-the-road” as if it were their own.

via Stay.com Takes Social a Step Further This Week – {Travel Daily News}.

Norwegian travel guide/trip planning startup Stay.com has just announced a new set of features to an already award winning travel platform. Named Time Magazine’s top travel site of 2010, Stay offers a new take on DIY trip planning. This week’s news centers around travel guide building using tips from various social networks.

The idea is that people can find all of their needs at the destination of interest, download their “tourist map” to their cell phone, and then ask their friends on social networks for recommendations. It would seem that Stay.com tends to favor larger metropolitan areas where more people have visited as well as the more famous landmarks rather than that perfect hole in the wall.  What happens when you get competing or conflicting recommendations? I also wonder if a wide social network converges to a more focused assessment of quality, or diverges to less focused assessments.

At Social Flights we have a mirror-image situation.  We search for all the people who want to know more about a certain subject, opportunity, or location and we seek to match them with people who know a great deal about that subject, opportunity, or location.  Then we’ll use our private aircraft to bring these people together for a truly valuable experience.   Together, such person matching represents supply and demand in their own private economy.  This is the same situation that hotels, restaurants, and tourist attractions have.  I would imagine demand for such a service would be stout.

When social media applications learn how to form and use a knowledge inventory, home-on-the-road applications will deliver an everlasting travel experience as well as an ever expanding and relevant social network. Our bet is that innovative companies like Stay.com will eventually arrive at this magical place of perfect information.

Many of us who work in business aviation wonder if people would be willing to share their travel plans, share a flight together, let others know what they are up to, so they can meet up on trips, share rides from the airport to the hotel and so forth.

In other words, will business aviation travel go social?

One of the terms used for the aircraft we operate is “private” which does not exactly line up with “social” in a public sense.  We fly “private jets.” Private sounds like I don’t want the public to know what I am doing, where I am going and I most likely do not want to share my private ride.

Sharing is already happening in the world of airline travel and the events that drive travel; maybe to ease the pain inflicted on travelers by the airline system.

As I have looked around on the internet for social media platforms related to travel some really interesting ones have started showing up.

• Planely (www.planely.com) allows airline travelers to share their flight itinerary with the hope of connecting with others on the same flight. If this builds critical mass it could become a valuable tool.
• IMGuest (www.imguest.com) allows travelers to share their hotel location and plans in order to meet up face to face with others at the same or close by hotels, and expand their network.
• Plancast (www.plancast.com) is a site that is really done well, allowing people to post their plans for attending conventions, local events, music events, etc. and easily see who else is attending. A great way to make connections both locally and at away events.
• TripIt (www.tripit.com), which just announced its acquisition by Concur (Nasdaq: CNQR), was one of the first travel sites allowing travelers to share their itineraries that gained a mass adoption. Concur is a leading provider of integrated travel and expense management solutions and apparently thinks TripIt is on to something based on the acquisition price.

These sites allow you to sign up and use them for free, and in some cases check in through your Facebook or Twitter accounts. The Facebook check-in creates an instant profile for fellow travelers to see plus it gives the site access to your Facebook information.

So the question asked again: Are travelers willing to share their travel plans in the hope of making the experience more social? The answer seems to be yes, as travelers are signing up to these social technology platforms in droves.

What about personal and business travel in private chartered aircraft?

What is the value in sharing travel plans with others you don’t know too well? Is it too risky?  Most of these sites tout the value proposition of networking and meeting up with people you would not otherwise meet.

The value of each of us knowing where others are going can go beyond just networking.

If you and I find out we are going to the same places, we can get together and come up with new solutions for getting there more efficiently by sharing costs and buying travel collaboratively. Eventually we may even be able to drive the market to offer better solutions that fit our needs, versus what suppliers of air mass transportation offer us today.

It would great if we could go when and where we really want to go in the most efficient manner as opposed to being pushed and shoved through a system that is not designed to really meet our intentions.

When that happens can the private aircraft, and the industry that supports it, be a possible solution?

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In a September 2 post I discussed Congressman Oberstar’s statement that possibly we should consider re-regulating the airline industry. His opinion is that the mergers happening between major carriers are bad for the consumer and will leave them with fewer choices, higher prices and less service.

I am opposed to regulation of the airlines in matters of customer service and free market competition. With the exception of matters of safety, I believe the government should step aside and let the market work things out. The government does not have a good track record meddling in matters of the free market.  

A September 5 blog by William Swelbar at www.swelblog.com has been posted that intelligently puts the facts out and further convinces me of the government’s need to get out of the way. The blog title, “Dear Chairman Oberstar: What Do You Mean This Is Not What You Voted For?” sets the tone of this post.

If you are interested in this issue Swelbar’s post is a well written argument on the history and merits of the deregulation of the airline industry that happened in 1978. Jump over to his site and take a read .

Even though business aviation and general aviation compete with the airlines for some portion of the travel market it is still good for the economy and the aviation industry as a whole to have a free market system of profitable and competitive airlines to keep our economy moving.

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In the New York times bestselling book, Delivering Happiness, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh (pronounced “Shay”) chronicles the rise of Zappos .com from obscurity to profitability and finally to its now infamous  1.2 billion dollar acquisition by Amazon.com .  He outlines Zappos’ legendary focus on customer service and corporate culture.   As I read Hsieh’s book, I couldn’t help but imagine the possibilities and implications for those of us who love flying and aviation related businesses.

In the introduction, Hsieh, takes us into his thoughts as he prepares to announce to Zappos’ employees that Amazon was acquiring the company.  While the media was focused on the sheer size of the deal, Hsieh’s thoughts were elsewhere:

 “To all of us in the room, we knew it wasn’t just about the money.  Together, we had built a business that combined profits, passion, and purpose.  And we knew that it wasn’t just about building a business.  It was about building a lifestyle that was about delivering happiness to everyone, including ourselves.”¹

There are several things noteworthy in this quote.  One is the sense of team that you feel.  Hsieh speaks in terms of “us”  and “together”.  Clearly the focus is on something more than the bottom line.  Words such as “passion”, “purpose”, “lifestyle” and “happiness” all speak to the company’s core values and goals.  Hsieh notes later that, “We decided that we wanted to build our brand to be about the very best customer service and the very best customer experience.” ²  What Zappos discovered was that by creating a culture centered on these values and expectations,  profitability developed.  

 Zappo’s Rabid Dedication to the Customer & Employee

As I read, I would often seek out my wife to read her passages (some guys read poetry to their wives…so much for romance!)  I would begin with saying, “Can you believe that a company would do this?”   Here are a few examples: 

• Customer service that includes free, unannounced upgrades in shipping.  You place an order for shoes that should take 4 days to arrive and without warning –for free—they’re on your doorstep the next day.
• A reward system for employees for pursuing personal development.  A lending library of the best personal growth books was created in the lobby to do just this.
• Free shipping on all orders…and if the shoes don’t fit you can send them back for free!
• If they don’t have the shoe in stock, they will research three competitor’s websites and will direct the customer to the competitor.
• In 2008, Zappo’s was faced with making a round of layoffs.  Instead of the standard 2-week severance, they offered to pay each employee through the end of the year (which at the time was about 2 months).  They paid an additional amount for those who had been with the company 3 or more years.  They reimbursed laid-off employees for 6 months of COBRA payments.

This made me want to buy shoes, just to have the Zappos experience.  Which is exactly the point- the experience.

 The Zappos Experience- Happiness

In 2009 Zappos inserted a simple statement into their vision that reflects the underlying core value that is at the heart of their company.  It says, “Zappos is about delivering happiness to the world.”³

Hsieh and Zappos are not talking about some “fuzzy” notion of happiness, which many people equate with silly giddiness.  Instead, Hsieh studied the concept of what makes people happy and investigated ways to integrate his findings into his company.  In his book, he offers several frameworks to consider, such as our need for perceived control in our lives (having a say in our future and in our work), perceived progress (we can see that we are going somewhere—don’t we all hate “dead-end” jobs?), connectedness (being in relationships that are truly fulfilling) and meaning/vision (being a part of something larger than ourselves that we believe in). 

This type of corporate emphasis helped develop a company culture that focused on amazing customer service, which aimed ultimately at customer happiness.   While Zappos was certainly concerned with profitability and bottom line, they managed to never lose sight of the crucial importance of what they were delivering, but how.  I think this begins to intersect and have application for the aviation industry. 

What if a flight school moved into the realm of radical customer service?

As an industry it simply doesn’t appear that we’re asking the customer experience question.  And yet, in some ways, flying is all about experience.  It’s built into the act of flying.  But what isn’t built in is how we attract and retain customers by giving them an experience of service.  

For instance, let’s consider flight training.  How do we attract and engage the customer before they officially become a customer?  What could we do to serve them before we’re asking for their money?  

• How about having a pleasant lobby area and facilities that are well kept?  (Seriously, the urinal that overflows regularly should be fixed. Gross.)
• How about having snacks available for free?
• Coupons (have any Flight Schools tried Groupon.com) for flights?
• Free airplane rides.  Publicize well, donate a couple of hours on a Saturday to give rides to the community.
• Flight training material professionally produced and ready to be given to the new student.
• Aircraft that are clean, up-to-date, and well-maintained.  (If your preflight involves duct-tape, think again.)

 As a customer, what kind of experience might we give our customers if we:

• Randomly chose a student to receive a free hour of instruction?  They come in from the flight line only to discover they owe nothing. 
• Instead of having them buy more and more books and videos, develop a lending library
• If you have access to a twin or jet and space permits, let your student go for a ride
• Quarterly celebrations for new solos and new licenses.  Could be as simple as a cookout at the airport in honor of these new pilots. 
• Encouraged lifelong learning by giving seminars and offering guest speakers to the larger aviation community

What about instructors?

• Incentives for recruiting (Bonus for giving 5 or more discovery flights…extra for each one who begins training) 
• Bonus for each student who successfully receives their license
• Reward for longevity (create a stable base of instructors)
• Instructor dinners and socializing
• Opportunities for adding new ratings at reduced cost and free recurrency training.

These are just ideas, some of which might be difficult to employ.  How refreshing it would be to potential pilots and employees to discover a flight school with a culture that was geared to providing the best possible service and create what Hsieh calls a “WOW” factor. 

Whether we’re talking about flight schools or maintenance departments or FBO’s, I believe there is something to be learned from Zappos.  Imagine, tomorrow, what it would be like to be “WOWED” by your company in its relationship with you.  Imagine what it would be like to WOW your customers and the transformed relationship with them.   Imagine the impact of those combined experiences, the word of mouth that would ensue, and the absolute fun of being in the flying business.  

It begins with a commitment to developing or changing the culture and embracing a foundational shift towards clearly defined values and competencies that will shape the entire organization.  It is about delivering an experience that is first class and recognizing that our happiness is found not only in profits (which is certainly needed) but in living with passion and purpose. 

If Hsieh and Zappos can do it with shoes,  I believe we can certainly do it with airplanes. 

Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose, Tony Hsieh, Business Plus, New York: NY, 2010

 1. Page 11

2. Page 121

3. Page 177

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“Group Buying” was an idea that first surfaced during the “dot com” boom and ultimately failed to build any momentum.  The idea is again gaining popularity in the era of social media where scalability can be introduced as aggregation cost diminish on applications such as Facebook and Twitter.

Ditch the gatekeeper, axe the marketers, lose the spam.

My first reaction is to find the most unsavory business transactions today and eliminate all the unnecessary middle men and their costs, gateways, noise pollution, and inefficiencies.

Why can’t there be one cell phone store where I can buy anything for any mobile device? Why do I have to pay to use my credit card and pay to not use my credit card? Why am I still treated like a terrorist precisely when I am doing everything that I can to avoid terrorists?

There are some glimmers on the horizon.

Applications such as SocialBuy, Groupon, and Living Social, use their social media platforms that offer vouchers for steep discounts on a variety of goods, once a minimum threshold of consumers is reached.  People have an economic incentive to promote products in their social network (on Facebook and Twitter) in order to reach those thresholds more rapidly and consistently.

Product Networks?

Suppose the group buying experience could aggregate packages of products.  Strategic products would then be aggregated as  ”A Network of Products” that together increase net value.  Yes, you heard me…a ‘combination of products’ with Twitter followers.  A zip car, a movie ticket, Segway rental, and a dinner coupon could be aggregated into an entertainment / shopping package.

This is not so strange.

Apple’s enduring success is very much a model of commercial social aggregation. Nobody can compete with an iPhone without also offering iTunes, iMovie, iPad, and all the social trappings of the iStore.  Perhaps Google, with its social commercial network can compete resulting in a duopoly.  Group buying can empower the smaller players and bust monopolies in an infinite array of combinations.

Why not air travel?

The door-to-door travel time and social cost to fly between two small cities, say, 500 miles apart using commercial airlines is greater than just driving. There is no other alternative, sans high-speed rail, and the economic result is that the two cities remain small with very little new commerce or diffusion of new ideas that air travel benefits a region.  People just don’t travel much between, say, Omaha NE and Cheyenne, WY.

Yet, small city pairs within 500 miles have strong extended family roots, migration patterns, and social network density.  It would be relatively easy to offer Group Buying on a 20-25 seat private airplane for less than the cost of driving; and in 1/10 the time!

The travel package could include ground transportation, shopping coupons, and maybe even a A zip car, a movie ticket, Segway rental, and a dinner coupon could be aggregated into an entertainment / shopping package.

Every small city economic development agency in the country should be in this business of building social networks and matching them with product networks between other small city pairs…

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Thanks to Forbes.com and Managing Editor Carl Lavin for giving business and private aviation a voice on their site.

Two weeks ago, Forbes.com started a new blog site called Wheels Up  to give a forum for conversations to those of us in the business of business aviation and to private aviators as well.

I was fortunate to be asked to contribute posts along with others including Plane Conversations and CFMCharter friends Clint White , Susan Friedenberg and new friends Jeffrey Reich,  and Jeremy R.C. Cox.

Other contributors so far include passionate private aviators Pierre de Fermor, Michelle C. Torres-Grant, and Carl Lavin weighing in from Forbes.com perspective.

This is great for our industry to get the opportunity to share our stories and engage in conversations with the Forbes readers about the value proposition of business and private aviation. Maybe we will no longer be the best kept secret?

The social media conscious people in our industry need to support Forbes efforts by promoting this new site with Tweets, Facebook and Linked In sharing of the posts, and most importantly, by engaging in the conversation through comments on the site. As we generate traffic and interest, and bring the conversation to the traveling public, we will all benefit.

From looking at the site daily it appears that we are getting some good traction and this is just the beginning.

Happy Fathers Day to all of you who are Dads. Being a father is the most important job we have! 

Have a great rest of the weekend.

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Update on the FAA Reauthorization Bill

In a post on rollcall.com , Representative Jerry Costello urges Congress to “finish the job” regarding the passage of the FAA Reauthorization bill that has been beating around Capitol Hill for more than three years. Representative Costello, Democrat from Illinois, is Chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee on Aviation.

I believe most everyone in General Aviation and the Airlines support the funding to develop the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen). The airlines are still squawking about who will pay the cost of new equipment required to upgrade their fleets to work with NextGen.  I can not imagine any situation where the airlines will ever really be content with how they are being treated by the government, so nothing new there.

NextGen will hopefully bring efficiency to a system of air traffic control that is at present marginalized and operating on 1960’s ground radar based technology.  Satellite guidance should allow more air traffic to flow in crowded corridors which will reduce delays and save fuel.  Maybe there will even be some reduction in the frustration passengers are experiencing today with airline travel!  Less delays on the ground and the air surely will make people happier.  Additionally, the airways will be safer with the new technology that will be more accurate in aircraft location and guidance.  

We have posted  several times about this Bill on Plane Conversations because it is important to our national air transportation infrastructure.

I don’t know the exact financial picture of this legislation.  I do know that an increase in the aviation fuel tax will fund some portion if not all of it.  In essence the users of the aviation system, including general aviation, will pay for the new technology that will benefit everyone.  Most people don’t mind paying for something if they see the value.

Hopefully the FAA will manage the program development wisely and give us our money’s worth.  Time will tell.  For now, Congress needs to do their job and get a Bill to the President to sign.

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Darren Goode reports on Government Executive.com that House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Rep. James Oberstar, D-Minn., predicted last  Wednesday that a multiyear FAA authorization bill will be signed into law by July 4.

Quoting Rep. Oberstar “I think we’ve made enough progress and we ought to be able to get it done by then,” he said. “We are working toward that goal. We’ll get there, we’ll do it.”

For the complete article:

http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0510/052010cdam2.htm

In its present form all of the associations that represent the various general aviation constituencies, including NBAA and NATA are for the authorization bill.

There is a provision in the bill on the house side that makes it easier for FedEx workers to Unionize. Obviously FedEx management opposes this provision and has fought it all along the way. It was taken out of the Senate version thanks to the help of our Tennessee Senators.

I have said this before, and will say it again. I do not understand why the provision dealing with FedEx has to be in a bill that funds the FAA and should be dealing with the entire aviation system. It seems to me that lawmakers like loading up these bills with provisions that take care of their key constituencies, which in this case for House Dems would be the Unions. There doesn’t seem to be any rational correlation between funding the FAA and FedEx unionizing?  

OK, Back to the FAA Bill:

It will be good for the FAA to finally have a funding authorization that is more than 3 months or a year. They have been on the short string for three years now. Hopefully the FAA can take this and do something positive with the NextGen Air Traffic Control System.

On the GA side, we will pay more fuel taxes but most people think that is not a bad price to pay in return for no user fees. I tend to agree. Once a new type of tax sneaks in it never seems to go away and the old tax never goes away either. At least we in the FBO and charter business understand how to collect and pay the fuel tax. It is an efficient way of funding our aviation infrastructure system. User fees in other countries around the world have proven to be a nightmare for operators to handle from an administrative and accounting standpoint.

We should expect some inefficiency in how the money is spent, because after all it is big government and there is no disincentive for inefficient spending. Hopefully if the FAA throws enough money at it we will eventually get a NextGen system that can effectively increase the flow of traffic through our airways and make the system more time efficient and save fuel.

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