Shearwater Blog

A couple of weeks ago I was reading an interview with Joobili CEO Jared Salter by Guillaume Thevenot. Guillaume needs to update his profile on his blog, as it still says he works at Amadeus, even though we unfortunately lost his talent to Tripadvisor earlier this year; but back to Joobili - I’d heard a number of other people mention this site, but it wasn’t until I read the interview above that I actually went and took a look for myself. I’m glad I did.

Back in January I wrote a couple of articles talking about the future of travel search. They actually turned out to be very well received by readers, but in hindsight, a company like Joobili would have been a perfect fit to have been mentioned in the second of those two posts. And when reading this interview Jared Salter did with Tim Hughes back in November 2009, it made my omission even more glaring.

The next part will be integrating price into the results through partnerships with other sites. One other trend is that price is no longer the sole motivator as discounting becomes permanent. For example we have been working with Wizz air [Low cost carrier in Europe]. They offer a 50 euro flight to Rome. It is always 50 Euro. There is not longer an urgency around the discount or low price because they always a low price. Therefore Wizz need to match the cheap flight with time sensitive inspiration to build in a sense of urgency. Price is an extremely motivator for travel behaviour but it is becoming not enough to drive urgency in consumer behaviour.

The Joobili product still has a few rough edges; the profile creation and content addition navigation was not as intuitive as it could have been, I was sent to a 404 page not found error immediately after registering, and not letting someone register on the site without entering a year of birth is totally pointless, but these criticisms are tiny when compared to the really nice UI layer Joobili have built on the front page, and then the way the recommendations are presented and filtered which works nicely. In fact, if I’d recommend skipping the registration process and then you’ll be hard pressed to find much to complain about. This site really manages the inspiration part of travel search extremely well.

Longer term, user registration is where an added layer of value is, as it then enables the social features that are a natural extension of this model. Joobili has some today, but it is still at a very early stage. Whilst writing this, I did go back and look at WAYN to see if they were getting into this same space, as I’ve written in the past how they were thinking of changing their business model – I was surprised to see their new focus appears to be sex tourism, albeit in a more socially acceptable form. The slogan: “Do something you love, with someone you’d love to do it with” and “Dating, wherever you are, whenever you fancy it.” Unfortunately not the type of inspiration I am covering in this post today, but an interesting idea to share a lot more than just itineraries.

With the type of travel inspiration Joobili are covering, and how they are doing it, this is exactly the type of innovation I was envisaging when writing on the future of travel search. Combine Joobili style inspiration and discovery with search by attributes (eg. Affinity Shopper) and then integrate the social features starting with pre trip planning and post trip sharing, combined with good database mining to push appropriate travel suggestions, and you have a formula that really has the potential to redefine how a decent proportion of leisure travel is searched and booked.

Earlier today I had one of the more interesting lunches I’ve had in many weeks, and it has really got me thinking about so many issues; from branding to social media to monetization, and then how all of this might be effectively leveraged, managed and measured. And I’m not even thinking of an airline at this point, but in the true spirit of this blog I’ll be sure to try and find some link to something aviation related before the end.

The lunch was with a man we’ll call JohnnyG99X – mild mannered accountant by day, musician in smokey dens by night, and blues guitar teacher online with close to two million views on YouTube. Here he is showing you how to play an accountic version of Layla if you have a spare guitar lying around the house and fancy yourself as the next Eric Clapton. Two million views doesn’t quite get him into the Judson Laipply league of viral, but in the finest traditional of the long tail, niche is now, and JohhnyG99X appears to have carved out a very nice little niche indeed. Now he just needs to parlay that into solidifying and then monetizing his own personal brand – but one step at a time.

Here comes the airline question – Are smaller airlines sitting back and leaving social business initiatives to be owned by their larger competitors? Or are some smaller airlines playing to their strengths just like JohnnyG99X and setting up a genuine social media presence?

In many cases the smaller airlines underplay this card, but definitely not in all cases – just look at Martinair on Twitter or Volaris getting their message out; but I do think smaller airlines in general are way underutilizing the potential of what is available. Maybe I’m drawing a long bow with Volaris, but social business really is a mindset, and its no use slavishly embracing all the cool technology if it is not the key type of social interaction your target market is relying on. Take this great answer from the Mexican carrier:

Cranky Flier : Do you get most of your VFR [visiting friends and relatives] traffic from travel agents?

Volaris: No, most is online in the US and it’s growing in Mexico as well. It’s all word of mouth and targeted community involvement. We’re often at parties, fiestas, in the community but we don’t do widespread marketing.

That was about as social as you can get! And it illustrates how effective engagement via social channels really is so much more than just knowing which website is the latest buzzword.

Whereas a lot of what I’ve written on mobile has realistically been more aimed at the larger carriers, and likewise for some of the earlier stuff I was writing on proprietary social networks, having an effective presence in social media may actually be an area where smaller carriers have an advantage over the larger ones.

Smaller carriers should in theory be able to act more quickly, are more likely be be run in a collaborative rather than confrontational style, and the perceived distance between employee and passenger is less. I’m sure if I thought about it properly I could come up with at least another five or so advantages that would typically accrue to a smaller airline, and all of these play to the strengths of a company wanting to engage in a genuine social business model.

So in a sense, many smaller airlines find themselves in the same predicament as JohnnyG99X – they suspect they are sitting on a valuable and underutilized asset (their niche-ness), but they don’t really know how to play to this strength and make it work for them. Social media is a big part of the answer, but I know from talking to airlines frequently that fear of the unknown is holding back genuine participation and therefore in many cases little or nothing is happening.

If you can’t make it to Madrid to join JohnnyG99X and I for lunch, then grab me at an upcoming conference, call me, email me, contact me via carrier pigeon, or even ignore me completely and just absorb the message written above, but don’t sit back doing nothing. Motion creates emotion, and social business really is the ideal way of getting passengers more engaged with your small-airline brand.

Sometimes I hear people talking about airport IT, and whilst it is not an area that concerns me personally, I do listen more carefully when they start talking about the potential for airports to increase revenue from areas that have traditionally been the domian of the airlines. Loyalty programs is one such idea that comes to mind, as is just about anything that uses the term ancillary revenue. On this latter point, I saw an interesting slide deck from industry consultants SH&E talking mainly about the evolution of LCC’s, but it did contain one slide relevant to todays topic.

I thought it nicely illustrated the point about both sides trying to encroach on what has traditionally been the territory of the other. I’ve spoken about the Bow Tie model plently of times, and the crux of this model is all about bringing traveller spend forward in order to reduce the influence of those to whom it has traditionally gone. Retailing is huge business for airports these days, and one example is airlines are trying to bring forward the purchase of duty free by selling it on their website to passengers with upcoming trips.

Another option for airlines is to improve how they sell inside the cabin to catch opportunities missed by the airport. I’ve always suspected this could be done a lot better, and I was interested to read recently from Travalo in regard to British Airways that “the fragrance atomiser has become the best-selling accessory on board the UK flagship carrier.” The story followed with “Refillable perfume atomiser Travalo has become the best-selling product in the accessories category on board UK flagship carrier British Airways.”

At first I was surprised that this was really the top selling item on board the plane, but go back and read it more carefully. It says: ”best-selling product in the accessories category.” In the good old tradition of some other fine flacks with clever copy, without knowing what else (if anything) is actually classed as being in the accessories category, I have no way of knowing how impressive this claim really is. But who cares about small details when most people will have just taken away that Travalo is actually the best selling product on the plane. Nice work.

I really like things that are elegant in their simplicity, and the article I was reading with the same title as this post on Search Engine Guide really hit the mark. Here is how it opened.

With so much social media focus on sites like Twitter, FourSquare and Facebook these days, it’s easy for companies to neglect one of the single most powerful social media tools available: their blog. In fact, for companies who are looking to increase their search engine optimization efforts, a well-crafted blog can make a dramatic difference.

In fact, HubSpot released a study last summer showing some dramatic search related differences for companies including blogs as part of their content strategy. Their data shows small businesses who blog have an average of 97% more inbound links, 434% more indexed pages and 55% more visitors.

Jennifer Laycock even has a great diagram that I’m sure will be lifted and reused in corporate presentations trying to convince others internally of the benefits of blogging as part of a social media strategy. In fact, I was asked by someone just yesterday how they could dip a toe into the social media pond, but bearing in mind that their boss liked the sound of social media, wanted to be seen to be embracing the latest “thing,” but was paranoid of losing control. Based upon what I was told, it sounded like the boss in question did not really understand what social business is all about; but in this scenario a social media evangelist pushing an all or nothing approach is likely to end up seeing nothing at all being implemented. I suggested a measured implementation of blogging amongst other ideas like an online poll as phase one. In order to get comfort that this would not end up like a Nestle Facebook disaster, blogging with a very clear comments policy stating something along the lines of comments being encouraged so long as they were on topic and not dafamatory etc would also be imperative to get senior management buy-in. So long as you have a clear policy on what is acceptable and state upfront how you will deal with potential issues (eg. under what conditions comments will be removed), then dipping the corporate toe into social is much easier for large companies to swallow. But please don’t take this as an endorsement of the “we want to control the community” approach, as having that mindset really shows a lack of appreciation for how a company can benefit from social media. 

For one example of a company using social media well, take a look at todays entry on the Finnair blog – check out all the keywords here likely to drive search engine traffic that would normally never appear on a normal airline website:

We can be content if our work is so agreeable that it’s a pleasure to do it day after day. My job is like that. I work for Northport as a customer service coordinator in Staco (Station Control).Staco is the ground handling services nerve centre, where between five and twelve people work for four different companies depending on the time of day. Some work for Finnair, some for Northport, others for Barona Handling and the remainder for Interhandling. Air traffic coordination has more than enough moving parts. My colleagues and I in customer service coordination are responsible for ensuring that check-in, departure gates, Northport ticket sales and Gateway Service have the right number of personnel at the right time. We also ensure that Chinese and Japanese guides are available when Asian flights depart and arrive.

This type of writing is really going after a niche market of person that wants to deeply understand airline operations, but this is where corporate blogs can work in a powerful way. It is not going to sell more tickets overnight, but the cost is minimal and the perception it gets across over time of an airline with nothing to hide can send a very powerful message. Consistency is extremely important, and Finnair are showing this with the series of posts they have done so far giving a good technical understanding of an airline and putting a face to the people that passengers normally never see – do not underestimate the impact and value of this last part. How they syndicate this content to get parts of it across to travellers who would normally not go looking for it via Google is another important part of an effective communicaton strategy, but the blogging part of it certainly must be commended.

Despite linking quite frequently to other sources, it is rare that I personally endorse another blogger, one reason being that I don’t have a blogroll in the side panel as seems to be the trend these days. Today I’ll make an exception. An Amadeus colleague of mine has recently started a blog called Planes, Trains, and Automation and even though he is going after a different audience to most of the readers of this blog, it is worth taking a look at.

Eric Olesen and I worked closely together in the past when he was leading development for Amadeus Revenue Integrity in Tucson and I was leading the push to roll out Direct Channel Automation to airlines globally. These days he works for Amadeus in Chicago and consults to travel agencies and airlines. His blog seems to be aimed at people with an interest in US airlines, especially those interested in IT systems for running reservations and inventory. Of course he covers a lot more, but one thing I really hope he keeps up is creating good diagrams to accompany his posts. This is what I call the Dave Armano blogging strategy, and it really is impressive if you can sustain it. Other people lift your diagrams and hopefully have the courtesy to link back, thereby getting your word out to a much wider audience.

Below I’ve added a recent illustration of Eric’s on the frequent flyer relationships between different airlines.

So whilst I’ve personally gone after a narrow target of direct channels, and lately have been writing mostly on mobile, social, ancillary revenue and other innovation relevant to airline websites, Eric deserves a much wider audience.

It is always lonely in the early months writing regular posts and having very few people reading, but if Eric keeps producing the insightful diagrams and the informative written content, then I’m sure he’ll have a loyal audience in no time. He’s even jumped back on his Twitter account after being a skeptic for so long, so he must be serious!

It been a big giant week for geo. But then again, barely a week goes past without some interesting mobile location based news. The biggest news was the new iPhone OS4.0. Yesterday I hinted at the advertising functionality, but it is the GPS enhancements that really have a lot of people excited. Here is one example:

Totally Unexpected: Background Location

All of the Apple nerds at SimpleGeo Boulder were crowded around a single screen and when this announcement hit, we all jumped for joy. As part of the multitasking features Apple added, they introduced new background APIs that a developer could use to extend their app while it’s closed. These included: background audio, background VoIP and background location.

So what does it mean?

This means that any app that’s using geolocation as a feature, context, or anything else, will now be able to know where you’re moving even when the app’s closed.

I’m personally thinking there might be a user backlash against GPS tracking at some point, and then this just makes the PNR data on travellers more valuable, but I opened this post by claiming a week of big news, and Apple was not the only one getting headlines. Google released version 4.0.1 of Google Maps for Blackberry, and the specs looked very impressive, including search by voice. But when I tried to install it I was being asked to change permissions that were impossible to change - looking online, I am definintely not the only user impacted by this issue.

At first I thought it might have been the company restrictions set my the system administrator, but after I asked politely for him to install it on his own phone as a test I got the following response:

…its working on mine. Sorry. It told me to open the Policy view, and just return from that panel by saving the settings, which I did. And I do even have policy settings on my device. The only difference I see is, that you have a 8310 Device with FW 4.5 and I have a 9700 with FW 5.0.

So maybe it is the handset model or more likely the firmware version, but either way, it looked like the only option was to uninstall and return to the old version – now I am back using Google Maps for Blackberry version 3.2.1 and voice search, Buzz, starring and labs functionality will all have to wait for a later date, at least for me personally.

Over the Easter break I wrote another long piece on mobile for Tnooz and it is now up on the site.

Who will make money from mobile in travel and how will they do it?

The article was getting so long, that I’ve promised Tnooz a third piece to close out my thoughts on where the really interesting innovation in mobile travel apps may come from in the medium term. The story above actually covers more than just mobile apps, as it looks at other business opportunities related to mobile. One that I am totally convinced of is the sale and/or better use within the airline of passenger data. Apart from my own thoughts on the importance and value of data, I also saw this earlier this week:

Google, Yahoo and other major Internet advertising companies are developing new ways to tailor ads by tracking users’ online history — and can even auction off individual customers to advertisers in the few milliseconds between a person clicking a link and the page appearing on their screen.

With OS4 for the iPhone being launched today, rumour is that Apple will also be coming out with some big news on making better use of data to serve highly segmented mobile advertising. But when will large airlines harness the power of the data already within the PNR to augment GPS data for advertising purposes and thereby unlock some of the hidden value? 

If you have no interest in mobile, then maybe take a look at this; earlier this week Spirit airlines in the US announced they will be charging for carry on bags! Hat tip to Henry Harteveldt for picking up on this one first, and plently of other sites have also reported on this news in the last few days. Or if that doesn’t inspire you, maybe you’ll be more interested in a UK study on how expensive in-flight sandwiches sold by airlines really are!

Back to my next (yet to be written) piece on mobile for Tnooz. I really want to focus on bringing together better use of customer data, location based services (mapping, overlays, GPS and more), destination content, social networking and limited gaming aspects (think Foursquare) into one consistent view on enhancing the traveller experience when they are away from home, with the mobile app at its core. Primary focus of this will be the leisure traveller, but I’m also interested to see what parts of this can generate additional revenue for airlines from the business traveller (probably not the game part!). If you are working on anything interesting that you think could be mentioned within this upcoming story, please get in touch with me. Most important angle is that you should be able to explain how it can generate additional ancillary revenue for an airline, assuming it is the airline that licences the app and markets it to passengers.

Thanks for reading.

I’m 99.99% sure this is wrong, but it was interesting the other day on the Consumerist website to read a detailed account of one consumer’s individual complaint against booking hotels on the Continental website. Here is the quote:

Continental has no responsibility for this at all because they don’t make money of the service and it’s just for convenience

Take that up to 100%, as no way this would be true. I went and had a look at the Continental website and they seem to be using a white label Travelocity site, although they have done a very good job of masking this. The Continental website is making multiple calls to the site below during the booking flow.

Begin earning a competitive revenue share on a myriad of products, including Hotel, Air, Car, Activities, Vacation Packages and Last Minute Deals. As a WCT partner, you will enjoy the same competitive rates and inventory that are offered on Travelocity.com, but have your branding carried throughout the customer shopping and booking experience.

I was also interested to see calls from continental.com to estara.com which was a site I was not familiar with. They are now called ATG, and I took the below text from their website.

ATG Click to Call and Click to Chat engage visitors proactively and selectively offer them the opportunity to contact a live agent from any page on any Web site, whether powered by the ATG platform or not. These on demand services engage customers at the most relevant time, such as when a transaction is at risk of being abandoned, or when the consumer’s Web behavior implies confusion. Or they can offer live help only to high-valued customers or big-ticket sales. ATG Call Tracking enables marketers to track inbound phone leads, and more accurately measure pay-for-performance campaigns. Powered by our IP-based infrastructure, Call Tracking brings low-cost scalability and reliability to improve performance across channels.

I’m not sure if the Continental agent really told the passenger they were making no money from selling hotels on the website, but in this age of ancillary revenue where every extra dollar counts, it is inconceivable that this could be true.

I don’t know AirTran that well, but I am impressed by one thing; their staff communication website appears to be on an open to the public internet site. You can’t get much more open than that.

JetBlue also impressed me with a post on the their blog discussing very honestly how they are going with their new Sabre platform. Some of the most open communication I’ve seen coming out of an airline for a while.

…Customers will call in for their choice of a rebooking or refund and hold times go up. Why don’t we just hire a ton more Customer Support people, to offset the wait times on the phones? While a good idea in theory, in reality it would take months to train new Crewmembers, and most of the time they would be sitting around, twiddling their thumbs. Guess what? We’d still have to pay them, thumb twiddling and all, and that means higher costs for us, which would then get passed along to you- the Customer- in the way of higher ticket prices. And NOBODY wants that! The correct solution? Automated services and online rebooking. Those tools are being worked on diligently behind the scenes and we’ll make them available as soon as possible.

A lot of companies talk about wanting to become social businesses and getting the benefits of participation in social media and the like, but embracing this model of business is so much more than just hiring an intern to set up a Twitter account and a Facebook fan page. Openness like the examples above is definitely a big step in the right direction. As I wrote once before when discussing this theme:

…social media is not for everyone – it implies a decentralization of the message, and for large companies used to command and control type communications, this is a very big shift indeed. There are two types of businesses that come to mind where blogging, or social media in general may not be appropriate. The first is the type of business where the brand is built on so much hype that exposing the inner workings of an organisation may actually be damaging to the carefully manufactured facade – luxury goods retailing of global brands would be a good example of this. The second example would be companies that have an antagonistic relationship with staff. A unionized coal mine wouldn’t really matter as there is no consumer brand to be damaged, but for an airline with tense labour relations, active engagement with social media could be a recipe for creating even more management headaches, especially if social initiatives are used to try and patch over things rather than as a broader initiative to actually change the corporate culture.

One person who definitely doesn’t belong in the social business category is the singer / songwriter Prince (see LotusFlow3r.com story on Techdirt). But then again, after he (or more likely his record company) complained to YouTube back in September 2008 that a video I had put together of my baby daughter featured one of his tracks as backing music and then had my file pulled from the web, you won’t find me shedding any tears for him any time soon. At least movie director Kevin Smith (7.25 minute mark) suffered a similar response as I got when he asked Prince for permission to use the same song in one of his films, so now I don’t feel so bad.

I mentioned Panamanian carrier Copa recently and their new website. I know people working in airlines are always interested to know how others with similar roles are doing it. For that reason, this article from La Estrella (The Star) would be of interest to many readers, except for the fact that it is written in Spanish.

It is an interview with eCommerce Director Frank Kardonski, he says the new website cost five million dollars, and with an eCommerce team of over 30 people they spent 18 months building their new web presence, partly by benchmarking against other airline websites with the intention of reducing the number of clicks it took to obtain information. They have added new currencies and new analytics to ensure they measure customers returning to the site, as this will be one of their key measures of success.

I remember taking two airline website executives out for drinks in Cannes one evening a few years ago when they asked each other how many staff each one had in his eCommerce team. The exec from the larger airline said 50, whilst the head of eCommerce for the airline about a quarter of the size gave an answer of five people. You could just see the guy with 50 staff rubbing his hands together when he said half jokingly something like “it looks like I’ll have to tell my team to get more efficient.”