Plane Conversations

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?

1. Aggregating open seats available on more than 15,000 private aircraft flying everywhere
2. Making these seats available and transparent to the public for purchase as an alternative to the broken and anti-social commercial air service
3. Enabling fliers to self aggregate and for direct flights from communities with no service to destinations they have in common
4. Lowering the cost of private aviation by selling unused or under utilized assets, open seats

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.

There is a war brewing within the online 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:

1. Airline Technology Leading to Customer Alienation
2. Airlines Score Lowest In Customer Satisfaction
3. 92% of Executive Unhappy With Business Travel Experiences
4. Airline Delays, Cancellations and Complaints Rise

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. We are changing the direction of the race to the top.

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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:

1. Airline Technology Leading to Customer Alienation
2. Airlines Score Lowest In Customer Satisfaction
3. 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.

At Social Flights, we have said many times that nothing economic truly can happen until people get together to build something. Economics is the science of incentives and no incentive is stronger in the human species than family and community.  It does not take much of a chasm of reason to see why Google is so interested in travel and travel related properties.

Travel is the keystone for change; change of ideas, change of relationship, change of intentions, and change of markets.  A banker is not interested in money – they are interested in the rate of change of money; it’s called “interest rate”.  People are not interested in the same old story, they want the story to change – this is what keeps their “interest”

Again, we find Google at the center of the social “Interest Rate” in travel.  Don’t think for a minute that Facebook “timeline” is not also a move to capture how people change and react and adapt to the conditions around them. This almost makes it pointless for people to try to react to these changes because such a reaction is, in fact, registered by the platform driving the reaction.  Is this a problem?

From http://www.tnooz.com/2011/12/12/news/google-quietly-introduces-social-travel-service-schemer/

What makes you want to go to a place to begin with? When you have chosen a place – what makes you want to explore further? The inspiration phase of leisure trip planning research has been by far the hardest for tech-based services to master.

Google has announced (and started sending out Beta invites to) a new service, known as Schemer, which attempts to compete in this gap. Effectively it is local destination ideas based on tips from your (Google+) friends, celebrities (oh yes!) and professional destination content producers (ie. travel writers).

If destination research moves to starting at Google Schemer rather than Google Search, then Google will be able to pitch flights, hotels and other travel services, without having to necessarily work within the confines of their existing web properties.

Everyone else who makes it their business to build P2P platforms such as tour guides and recommendation platforms will be cut out of the loop.  If Google can now branch away from their core search and into the social connectivity business, they can compete with their own customers.  Is this a problem?

What Google does not do, and cannot do, is actually operate a jet aircraft.  They cannot clean a hotel room or manufacture a rental car.  They cannot cook a holiday dinner or wax a snowboard. Real people need to do this.  Why is Google chasing Travel?  Google is chasing people. At the end of the day, people drive Google. Is that a problem?

Ref: http://www.tnooz.com/2011/09/01/news/ultimate-guide-and-analysis-to-tour-guide-marketplaces-on-the-web/

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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Knowledge is power.  It’s not what you know, but what you do with what you know that matters. 

Enter social media, web 2.0, wikinomics, the digital age, the Google era-whatever you would like to call it.  The power of this enormous infrastructure and way of life, the power of social media is the sharing of knowledge by wise leaders. 

Let me briefly explain–Google shares information, but it certainly isn’t wisdom.  On the other hand, your friend, who has been listening to a podcast about a certain subject for a year now, knows you are looking for a new job in a related industry.  He knows that the host of the podcast is great friends with a guy in that industry.  A tweet is sent with a link to the podcast… Knowledge has been applied.  Wisdom has been shared.  Now connections have been made.

Enter video.  YouTube is probably the most widely known video social media channel, but there are many.  Here is an example:

What did you see? Probably a lot of things.  Did you see an acrobatic flight from the “bird’s eye” view of the pilot? A pilot getting his first lesson could learn a lot about the cross check…looking outside at the wingtips to maintain attitude, back and forth, now forward at airspeed.  These are the kinds of things that can only be learned in real time.  It’s challenging, even for an experienced flight instructor to explain this inverted.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what is video worth?

Did you see Johnny’s house in the early frames of the video, just to the far side of the brown field off the nose? How cool would it be for Johnny to see his house from that angle?! Even more exciting would be real time streaming video integrated into the flying video game on his HD TV.

Imagine a student pilot getting ready to go on his first cross-country flight.  The weather between here and the destination is forecasted to be VFR, but there is a slight chance it could deteriorate.  So he types in the web address for a new, video-based “Sky Maps” website, and sees that another pilot has just flown along that route.  By clicking on the airplane symbol on the “Sky Map,” a video is cued.  Student Pilot can now see the weather for himself, adding some knowledge to his decision-making process, painting a picture to supplement the weather forecast.

Did you see the weather off to the east in the video? Scientists could tap into a wealth of data to update meteorological models, validate predictions, understand these complex (and still quite mysterious) phenomena even better.

Did you see the turbulent airflow off of the upper wing? I didn’t either, but it won’t be long until a high-tech lens attachment the size of a dime gives Schleren photography capability to this portable video cameras.  In fact, the future holds a camera that looks wherever the pilot points it and captures images at any bandwidth in the spectrum of light.

One last application for the test pilots among us - the pilot was moving his head, large movements, and a lot of them, in other words, high frequency and high amplitude.  This data would certainly contribute to an understanding of the workload during this phase of flight.  At this point in the evolution of the technology, we don’t need six sigma certainty that it’s high workload.  We have a definitive qualitative understanding that it is.  The technology will mature, and the way we use it to collect quantitative measures of what has been previously subjectively evaluated should mature as well.

That’s what the future looks like…in HD.

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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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