DECEMBER 17, 2009 -- Airlines will be able to re-book passengers with missed connections while still inflight and issue them new boarding passes and gate numbers, all through their mobile phones, starting in the first quarter of 2010. The claim of the new services for disrupted travelers was made in an announcement on Tuesday of a partnership between two telecommunications specialists, the Swiss-based OnAir, which provides mobile phone connections and other inflight communications for 20 airlines worldwide, and French telecommunications infrastructure design company Halys.
OnAir said the deal would allow airlines to communicate with on-board passengers through personalized text messages. "Most of our current airline customers have expressed interest in implementing the service as soon as it is available," a spokeswoman told EuroBTN. OnAir's airline customers include British Airways, Ryanair, TAM and Qantas. It offers inflight-connectivity in every continent other than North America,
Research company PhoCusWright has estimated that 70 percent of corporate travelers carry Internet-enabled mobile phones.
Dec 24th 2009, 22:46 by The Economist | WASHINGTON DC
"FOR THE most part, passengers we deal with understand that we're not in control of the weather," Susan Elliott, a spokeswoman for Delta Air Lines, told the New York Times on Tuesday. Unfortunately for Delta, "for the most part" doesn't cover every passenger. Ms Elliott was speaking with the Gray Lady's A.G. Sulzberger because of a "passenger uprising" at the Delta terminal at New York's JFK airport. Delta called the airport police when crowds at the terminal became unruly, and Ms Elliott had the unenviable task of explaining the airline's decision to the press.
On one hand, boarding passes don't have to be so painfully designed, as this proposal proves. On the other, even gorgeous tickets won't guarantee an on-time departure.
This is the actual boarding pass I got from Delta. It's a nightmare. Note all the random alignments and spacing issues. This all started on a recent flight aboard a Delta Airlines plane. I was heading back from New York where I had met up with fellow designerDustin Curtis. If you are not aware of Dustin's take on American Airlines, go read this. Anyway, I was inspired by Dustin and his attitude towards shittily designed things, to say the least. I was bored so I started rummaging through my stuff trying to find something to read when I grabbed my boarding pass. So I stared at it for a while. Rubbed my eyes, then stared at it some more.
It was like someone put on a blindfold, drank a fifth of whiskey, spun around 100 times, got kicked in the face by a mule (the person who designed this definitely has a mule living with them inside their house) and then just started puking numbers and letters onto the boarding pass at random (yes, I realize that a human didn't lay this out, if a human had, judging by the train-wreck of design, they would have surely used papyrus). There was nothing given size or color importance over anything else, it was a mess.
And here's one of the designs he came up with:
Much improved. (Although colors can't be rendered on the thermal printers that you find at airport gates).
And come to think of it, receipts in general (which is really what a boarding pass is) are a tremendous wasted opportunity to convey real information, useful to consumers and businesses alike. In fact, Curtis actually tackled this problem, and he points to a solid design by 21-year-old Robert Anderson for Square Up, which makes mobile credit-card readers for iPhones:
As you can see, the receipt contains everything you need for coming back, and adding the business to your lifestream.
It makes you wonder: Shouldn't every piece of paper that a business gives you be actively encouraging you to do more business with them?
The real bogeyman, I suspect, is corporate attitudes towards design itself. Usually, design is looked at as an expensive luxury rather than something that builds brand value. What's baffling is that companies will gladly spend money on marketing, since they're used to the vague returns that promises. Not so much with design. But if you were to actually look at even the airline industry, design has been a key in creating the two most successful start-ups in recent history: Virgin Atlantic and JetBlue.
And then it makes you think: Man, I really hope this design activism thing catches on. The world really could use more input from young, loud-mouthed design geeks.
PLATFORM position is an elusive thing. You can be an expert in DC—knowing exactly what car to be in on the Red Line if you want to transfer to the Green Line at Gallery Place (the last one if you're headed towards Shady Grove)—and a complete ignoramus in New York, not even knowing where the exits are at 96th St. on the 1/2/3 (96th and 94th). Now a new company is coming to the rescue. The New York Times' City Room blog reports that a startup, Exit Strategy NYC, is releasing a mobile application that tells you the perfect place to stand to be ready to transfer—or exit—where you want.
The new app is on sale for the iPhone, the Android, the BlackBerry and the Amazon Kindle for between $1.99 and $2.99. It sounds like a cool idea, but your correspondent lives in Washington, not New York. Any New Yorkers get a chance to test it out? Let us know in the comments.
IF you're not protesting an election or promoting a product, Twitter, the microblogging site that has been getting so much attention these days, can be easy to dismiss.
It's been described as an ego-stroker for those who want to broadcast the minutiae of their lives in 140 characters or less. It's a virtual popularity contest to see who can rack up the most followers. And it's yet another way to procrastinate on the Web.
But after signing up for my own Twitter account earlier this year (www.twitter.com/michellehiggins) — and being guilty of all of the above — I can now attest to at least one practical use for travelers: complaining.
As hotels, airlines and other travel companies line up on Twitter to promote their brands, customers who voice their grievances in the form of tweets are getting surprisingly fast responses for everything from bad airplane seats to poor room service.
Take Tony Wagner, 34, a new-media director for an academic group in Washington. When he found out he wasn't seated next to his wife and 2-year-old daughter on a JetBlue flight to San Francisco over the Memorial Day weekend, he first called up customer service. But the agent told him to take it up at the gate. So Mr. Wagner indirectly sent JetBlue a message, by posting a plea for help on his Twitter account: "@jetblue Advice to get both parents and 2 yr old seated next to each other on flight later today? Right now only one parent. Full flight."
Exactly 19 minutes later, JetBlue tweeted back, suggesting they correspond privately, using Twitter's "direct message" feature: "@tonywagner Please follow us so we may DM!" After a brief exchange, JetBlue flagged his tickets as a priority concern.
Mr. Wagner suspects he received better service because of Twitter's viral nature. Twitterers habitually "re-tweet" one another's posts, not unlike forwarding an e-mail message to everyone in your address book. Companies, he said, "want to head off the conversation as quickly as possible," adding, that "it's in their best interest to make people who have a pulpit happy."
JetBlue puts a more positive spin on it. Disgruntled customers "tend to be the biggest opportunities," said Morgan Johnston, a spokesman for the airline who helps manage its Twitter account, which has more than 770,000 followers. "We can take that person aside and kind of pull them in and say, 'Hey, you seem to be really upset in front of several hundred or thousand people.' "
That might explain why some customers prefer Twittering over contacting customer service directly. "Their reaction time is speedier than being put on hold," said Sydney Owen, 24, a public relations intern from Chicago who recently tweeted about a Southwest boarding pass she had misplaced and received a nearly immediate response from the airline.
The immediacy of Twitter is also what appealed to Tony Haile, 32, the general manager of Chartbeat, a Web analytics site in New York City. When he noticed that the in-flight movies on Virgin America's New York-San Francisco route hadn't changed in several weeks, he tweeted, "How many months have to go by before Virgin America change their movies." What happened next, Mr. Haile said, "absolutely gobsmacked me." Moments later, Virgin America responded with an apology and an explanation: "We've faced a loading delay the last couple of weeks, so it will likely by June 1."
"I never ever had that level of customer service before," Mr. Haile said.
Getting a quick response through Twitter is one thing; getting a resolution is another. After Evan Reeves, 27, a Web developer fromPortland, Ore., spent an hour on the phone with Travelocity, trying to redeem a credit for a future flight, he jokingly posted the following tweet: "@travelocity your hold times are whack, bro. 56 minutes and counting!"
"It was more of a way for me to vent than to actually get any results," Mr. Reeves said. Even though, Travelocity quickly tweeted back with an offer to help, Mr. Reeves didn't hear back from anyone after responding with his contact information.
"I finally called them back on the phone after all the twitter nonsense, talked with a gentleman for about half an hour or so investigating my options," he said.
While many travel companies have yet to embrace Twitter, including Continental Airlines, others are using it in creative ways to connect with customers. In May, Hyatt Hotels created a Twitter profile, @HyattConcierge, to assist guests with anything a real-life concierge would do, like dinner reservations and spa appointments.
Omni Hotels has been monitoring Twitter to offer guests surprise perks. For example, Kevin Colón, 35, a pastor from Superior, Colo., twittered about his plans to watch the Final Four college basketball championships in April with friends at the Omni Interlocken Resort nearDenver. The marketing people at Omni noticed the tweet and notified the hotel. When the group arrived they were escorted to a reserved table with a good view of the TV and offered a free round of beers.
"They treated us all like V.I.P.'s," said Mr. Colón, who added that he now plans to tweet all the time about his travel plans. "We were very impressed."
Whether or not the special treatment will continue as Twitter becomes more popular is another thing. Mr. Johnston of JetBlue said he didn't want its Twitter account to become a "back channel" for passengers to "sneak around" customer service. Rather, he views JetBlue's Twitter profile as an "information booth" to point customers in the right direction.
Not to mention that complicated travel issues would be hard to solve in 140 characters or less — the limit placed on the length of Tweets.
"I think it's a great way to have your voice heard," said Christi Day, a spokeswoman for Southwest who works on the airline's Twitter feed. "I don't know if that's the best way to have your problem solved."
AIRLINES have made a point in recent years of driving purchases online (by charging fees for tickets booked over the phone, for example), saving themselves a small fortune in wages.But the implications of online fraud are considerable.According to a new survey by CyberSource, an online payments company, fraud cost the world's airlines more than $1.4 billion last year.Fraudsters' favourite tactic appears to be the good old stolen credit card, buying flights with stolen card numbers, then using (or reselling) the tickets before anyone twigs to the unapproved purchase.
One interesting finding is the discrepancy in the way airlines in different regions try to catch illegitimate ticket purchases.In North America, technology is the favoured tool, with airlines using an average of 7.5 automated fraud-detecting tools, and manually reviewing just 3% of bookings.In the Middle East, however, 81%of bookings get a manual review.No word in the press release about which strategy works better. But then, CyberSource, the company that sponsored the survey, has the stated mission of "improving the accuracy of automated screening", so presumably they see this study as a win either way.
Shouldn't your computer know a reasonable amount about your likes and dislikes? Wouldn't it be great if it could anticipate your needs and take action without you pressing a key?
Booking travel and restaurant reservations, rearranging meeting schedules or even taking a first cut at reading e-mail messages are among the mundane tasks that have remained beyond the reach of our PCs for decades.
But a new generation of Internet technologies, coupled with the investment of more than a third of a billion dollars, may be making meaningful progress.
The concept of a software personal assistant has long captured the imagination of a generation of science fiction writers and computer scientists. Oliver Selfridge, the artificial-intelligence pioneer who died this month, is credited with coining the term "intelligent agent," as well as the idea of a computer software "demon" - a simple software program that could monitor its environment and make appropriate responses when changes occur.
With the arrival of personal computing in the 1980s, the idea took the form of highly choreographed "vision" statements from many Silicon Valley companies. The most memorable was the Knowledge Navigator video, by John Sculley, then chief executive of Apple, in which an interactive assistant on a video display, clad in a bow tie, does research for a college professor and nags him to return his mother's phone call. But efforts to build useful computerized assistants have consistently ended in failure.
Now, a Pentagon research project and two Silicon Valley start-up companies are about to try again.
SRI International, a research group in Menlo Park, California, is approaching the end of a multiyear project called CALO, which stands for cognitive assistant that learns and organizes. CALO is financed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense and is one of the largest artificial-intelligence projects ever. Some public demonstrations have been given, but CALO is being developed largely in private because it is intended for the military.
There is already one quiet commercial spinoff from the project. Siri, based in San Jose, California, plans to introduce a personal assistance service in the first half of 2009. Still in "stealth" mode, with a small private test version of its service, Siri has raised $8.5 million from two venture capital firms.
"We're exploring concepts developed by the CALO project and applying them to the consumer," said Adam Cheyer, Siri's founder and vice president of engineering. He said that he expected the idea of personal assistance to gain momentum next year and that Siri would be joined by other competitors.
A different tack has been taken by the entrepreneur Patrick Grady. He has put together a technology team at Rearden Commerce that has already begun to reach a business audience with an "intelligent" personal assistant oriented toward travel and entertainment. It will be available next year for nonbusiness customers as well.
Rearden is one of Silicon Valley's most significantly financed but least known start-ups. Founded in 1999, before the dot-com crash, Rearden announced in April that it had recently raised an additional $100 million, for a total of $200 million in almost a decade. American Express and JPMorgan Chase each own 10 percent stakes.
Why might Grady succeed while everyone who came before lies face down with arrows in their backs? Timing, for one thing. The promise of the Web 2.0 era of the Internet has been the interconnection of Web services. Grady says he has a far easier task today because the heavy lifting has been done by others.
"This is the connective tissue that sits on top of the Web and brings you more than the sum of the parts," he said. "I set out to deliver on the longstanding 'holy grail of user-centric computing' ... a 'personal Internet assistant."'
He promises to bring together all of the discrete online services needed for business travel that are now separate - for starters, travel, airport parking, car services, dining reservations, entertainment tickets, package delivery and video conferences.
Imagine that you are on a business trip and your computer discovers that your flight will be late. It automatically reschedules your dinner in New York, informs your three guests of the change and tells you they have been notified.
One of Rearden's first customers, GlaxoSmithKline, has made the service available to more than 50,000 users in the United States and Britain; it helps to plan 3,000 to 4,000 trips a week.
"We think of it as a personal executive assistant," said Gregg Brandyberry, a vice president at the company. , who counts on the service to notify his BlackBerry of changes in his schedule while he is traveling
Thomas Garvey, an artificial-intelligence researcher at SRI, said CALO passed an important milestone last week when it was used in a United States Army test of a command and control system at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. CALO watches users work with computer systems and then automates routine tasks, he said. With CALO doing mundane work, he said, Army officers can focus on more important matters.
Have Grady or CALO or Siri cracked the code in the half-decade-long quest for a software personal assistant? Ordinary computer users will soon have a chance to find out.
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