Airborne between Paris and Hong Kong on a Global Airlines Boeing 2000ER, John and Jane Harbinger are lingering over lunch in the gourmet restaurant on the top deck (not much point in fast food on a 16-hour flight) figuring how they’re going to spend the rest of the afternoon. Jane decides on a soothing séance in the beauty parlor: John will make a few calls from the business center and polish his presentation. They’ll meet for drinks at six in the suite before dinner. ‘Would sushi hit the spot? I’ll book a table downstairs.’ John asks a passing ‘skycop’ for directions. ‘Head down the main corridor towards the tail and take the elevator down to the bottom deck.’
Planes such as this three-deck 1,000-seat Goliath – which entered service in 2015 – are derived from the 600-seat super jumbos promised (or threatened) by Airbus and Boeing in 1999. They are flying villages, allowing infinite scope for social congress, with half a dozen restaurant concessions – from classical French to McDonalds’ junk food – casinos, shops, cyber-cafes with Internet access, and health clubs. About the only things missing are a pool and an outside jogging track. But you never know!
There is no such thing these days as first, business or economy class. The price you pay depends on your choice of seating, cuisine and entertainment along with the kind of service you want on the ground. Accommodation ranges from standard cattle class and ergonomic sleeper seats with more personal space to air-conditioned cabins with beds, bathroom and butler service, that convert to a daytime lounge. For an extra charge, the airline will deliver a container to your home or office, transport you through the airport and load you onto the plan. Some tycoons have converted their offices into flight containers, re-creating the private railroad cars of a century ago – the ultimate in seamless travel.
Many people travel ‘a la carte.’ You book a seat or cabin and pay extra for meals and in-flight facilities and lounges, limos and other trimmings on the ground. Traveling cattle class is no longer much of an ordeal. You only have to stay in your seat for take-off and landing; the rest of the time you can move around freely. Skycops patrol the crowded aisles ready to deal with unruly or abusive passengers who can threaten not only the well being of other passengers but the safety of the aircraft. After all, on a long-haul flight you can be in the air for up to 18 hours – almost long enough to get married, start a family and get divorced, although not necessarily in that order. Some enterprising agents are using reservations computers to help people choose in-flight companions. They punch in your high-altitude likes and dislikes and match you up with a suitable seatmate.
Global Airlines is one of three mega-carriers that together share 80 percent of the world air travel market – the culmination of the giant airline alliances and code-sharing deals that carved up the skies in the late 1990s. These compete with consortia of regional airlines in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific, along with half a dozen long-haul carriers mainly serving the business market.
Code sharing, whereby two or more airlines operate the same flight, and ‘block seat’ arrangements, whereby one airline sells seats on another airline’s flights, became commonplace by 2000. The abundance of space on the superjumbos allowed several airlines to share the same plane with their own fares, flight attendants, in-flight cuisine and service.
This led to the concept of the ‘virtual’ airline. You don’t need to own aircraft and infrastructure when you can ‘brand’ your own cabin in a superjumbo. Travel agents can buy blocks of seats (and hotel rooms) and market them under their own brands to corporate customers.
Since 1999, superjumbos – along with advanced technology for better control of the airways with new satellite navigation systems and new airports and terminals – have diminished the specter of gridlock in the skies by quadrupling air traffic capacity since 1999. But the challenge was daunting. Since 1999, air traffic has been growing at around 10 percent a year.
Thus the number of passengers has doubled every seven years, reaching a staggering 20 billion in 2020. Where are all these people going? And, more to the point, why do they all seem to be going with me?
The growth of tourism in China has been phenomenal. The Chinese government set the ball rolling when it cut the working week to five days, giving the nation’s workers an extra half-day off a week.
This was even better news for the travel trade, because – assuming a workforce of 750 million from a total population of 1.2 billion – it meant an extra 15 billion days’ leisure time coming on stream. And with more disposable income and the liberalization of passports, the Chinese have become international travelers.
According to the World Tourism Organization, China now generates more out-bound tourism than any country in the world apart from Japan, Germany and the United States. China has also become the world’s top tourist destination with 137 million visitors in 2020.
The world’s top 30 airports will handle more than 16 billion passengers this year. The traditional mega-hubs such as Chicago O’Hare, Los Angeles International, Atlanta, London Heathrow, Hong Kong’s Chek Lap Kok and Singapore’s Changi are bursting at the seams, each handling around 200 million passengers a year. But an airport building boom, especially in Asia, has added capacity. China has built more than 50 new airports since 1999.
Meanwhile, the creation of ‘wayports,’ or new hubs, in remote parts of Norway and Siberia has siphoned off a large amount of connecting traffic. More than 30 percent of the people milling around Heathrow, for example, were simply trying to get somewhere else.
Supersonic travel has become space age with Orbitol, a 50-passenger space plane that travels in low earth orbit enabling it to fly from London to Sydney in 45 minutes. Unlike the old space shuttles, Orbitol takes off and lands under its own power. After accelerating through Mach 5 to 80, 000 feet, the plane leaves the atmosphere, continues to accelerate and becomes a satellite itself after reaching 250,000 feet – around four times the cruising altitude of Concorde – with an orbital velocity of Mach 25 to 30.
More down to earth, high-speed maglev (magnetically levitated) trains traveling at 300 miles per hour have replaced air travel on journeys of up to 500 miles, releasing slots at major airports, most of which have train stations, for long-haul traffic.
Regional airlines serve ‘thinner routes,’ enabling business travelers to avoid mega-hubs. Thus ‘regional long-haul’ services allow travelers to fly point-to-point between cities such as Manchester and Osaka, Seattle and Perth, Stuttgart and San Francisco.
Mega-hubs, with a larger daily population than many major cities, are no longer a means to an end but an end in itself, destinations in their own right. They form a worldwide network of alternative cities – what you might call the terrestrial equivalent of space stations – with their own business communities and civic amenities, hotels and conference centers. Who needs to go downtown when you are already there? Many people don’t travel to cities any more, just to airports.
John Harbinger, on-line to his office in Broken Springs, Colorado, asks himself a routine question: whether he really needed to make this trip.
Technology enables (and requires) him to be totally wired at all times. The No. 1 rule for business travelers is wherever you are, always to be on the phone to somewhere else. So why travel? John rationalizes that this is a working vacation – a chance to bring Jane along. He’s looking forward to a round of golf with his Chinese associates. And he and Jane plan to take off for a five-day airship cruise among the Hong Kong islands.
Modern airships are safe, comfortable, and environmentally friendly, as they sail and hover less than 100 feet above the ground. An airship cruise is a spectacular way to see many wonders of the world, such as the Amazon and what’s left of the rain forests in Brazil and Peru, chateaux of the Loire, fly along the Nile to see the pyramids, explore Venice or make an air safari in Kenya.
‘Virtual conferencing,’ has done away with the need for many business trips. A 100-inch (256 centimeter) illuminated high-resolution screen with ‘wrap-around’ sound makes everyone seem life-like and gives the illusion that you’re in the same room. This means that you can participate normally in the discussion; using the same body language.
Travel was in danger of becoming an end in itself. I am therefore I travel: I travel therefore I am. Travel is about human interaction, hands-on experience. Getting the best return on your ‘interaction expense’ is a trade-off between cost in terms of time, money and hassle and the opportunity of staying doing something more productive somewhere else.
Of course, there’s sometimes a need to be somewhere in person – the eye contact, the real, compared to the cybernetic, handshake, the impromptu meeting and, of course, the social dimension can be pure gold. It is not something you can quantify; it’s intuitive, gut feeling. Who goes to a conference to listen to the speakers? You can pick up a transcript or receive it live in your office. It’s real-time networking that counts.
In the words of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Homeric hero, Ulysses, back in 1842:
‘I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch where thro’
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.’
But business travel is less poetic and a good deal less sentimental. Which is why John Harbinger makes fewer trips these days. This excursion with Jane is a fairly rare experience in real-time reality. Like most other road warriors, John embraces the new ‘travel avoidance’ technology, such as virtual conferencing and virtual meetings in real or ‘displaced’ time, with chiliastic zeal.
The technology is rooted in voice recognition software developed back in the late 90s that enabled you to call a computer from anywhere in the world, check your e-mail your voice-mail and faxes, either by computer or through the telephone. You could convert them from voice to text, or vice versa, and re-direct them by any medium.
Recent advances in artificial intelligence make it possible to hold an open-ended discussion through a computer. The machine not only understands the meaning of what you say but replies to you in a normal voice – which might be the digitalized voice of a real person.
John Millennium, along with his colleagues, has had his voice ‘digitalized’ and stored on-line. Early computer-generated voices sounded robotic because words were mechanically strung together into sentences, thereby losing the rhythm of the dialogue; whereas digitalized voices are produced by recording entire sentences, then shoehorning in numbers and letters of the alphabet.
Voices are recorded in three ways. If you say the number nine, for instance, at the beginning of a word, it sounds different from if you say it in the middle or the end. The same applies to words and phrases.
It’s hard to detect a digitalized voice in displaced time from a real voice in real time. Meetings can thus be conducted in real or displaced time. You program your responses, to say, a budget meeting, in advance and your digitalized voice conducts a dialogue on your behalf. Cognitive programs are being designed whereby John can participate vicariously at several meetings while he is away. It beats the old way of having answering machines talk to one another, or batting e-mails back and forth, communication lost in fruitless volleys of non sequiturs.
Back in their suite, the Harbingers are mentally packing their bags for an ‘out of this world’ space vacation. They have been armchair astronauts for years and are looking forward to five days in a Disney Space Resort 300 miles above Earth. They will take off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in a NASA space shuttle adapted to carry 40 tourists, experiencing weightless for about 15 minutes.
The resort accommodates 300 people in cruise-ship luxury. It takes an hour and a half to make a complete orbit of the Earth, spinning like a roulette wheel at about one revolution a minute, thus developing artificial gravity.
You stay in an outer ring, where you experience about half of normal gravity – just about half your normal weight – so you can use bathroom facilities and such at practically normal conditions. A central column section has zero gravity. This is the entertainment and recreation center, which guests can visit for an hour or so at a time. There are windows in the central column to view the Earth.
There are lots of entertainment possibilities at zero gravity, including a gym with padded walls. Astronauts have found that blood that is normally drawn down to your legs is released and drifts upwards. You become thinner, your chest expands by two to three inches, your face fills out and wrinkles disappear.
While Jane muses about a second honeymoon in space, John is thinking about the final frontier in space travel – to experience Einstein’s paradox of relativity, that if you travel faster than the speed of light, you are younger when you get back than when you left. Daunting implications for a career in international business.
Will the successful no-frills, or budget airline, model work for long-haul, trans-continental flights? That is the question – especially in such dire economic times, when many airlines are cutting services and reducing capacity.
One airline that is bucking the trend is AirAsia X, the low-cost, long-haul affiliate of AirAsia (www.airasia.com), which has announced plans to fly five-times weekly non-stop (a 12-hour flight) between London Stansted and Kuala Lumpur, starting March 11, 2009. One-way fares start at £99 (RM49) for a 31-inch pitch seat, and from £549 (RM1,999) including airport taxes.
(Currently AirAsia X flies 4 times weekly to Gold Coast, Australia, and 5 times weekly to Hangzhou, China. AirAsia X aims to cover destinations which are more than four hours away from Kuala Lumpur, complementing the existing AirAsia network and offering daily point-to-point frequencies to popular destinations in Australia, North Asia, India, the Middle East and Europe.)
[No-frills carriers are modeled on Southwest Airlines in the United States. They are characterized by point-to-point services, high utilization of aircraft, low distribution costs, achieved with on-line booking, and variable one-way fares that reflect demand for flights at different dates and times of the day. Such has been the success of carriers such as EasyJet, Ryanair, Air Berlin, and German Wings, that ‘full-service’ airlines, like Air France, SAS, Swiss and British Airways, have adopted similar low-cost, one-way pricing in order to compete on short-haul routes in Europe. It is often hard to tell the difference these days between no-frills and the full-service, or ‘legacy,’ carriers in Europe, as they both raise the stakes in competing with one another.
Analysts have long debated whether the ‘no-frills’ formula can work with long-haul services, if only because quick aircraft turnarounds can be frustrated by issues of safety and time-zone constraints, and crew schedules. And of course, the discomfort span: will passengers tolerate being jammed for eight hours into a knee-crunching seat that they might just about put up with for a short flight? And one has to offer some creature comforts on a long flight.
Craig Jenks, president of Airline/Aircraft Projects Inc. in New York, says, ‘You are asking, can one become the other and vice versa? The answer is that the high-cost full-service carriers are doing their best to reduce costs. And the low-cost carriers over here are going progressively longer haul. JetBlue and Southwest both fly from Coast to Coast, one hour less than the North Atlantic. You might say, if they can do that, why can’t they just cross the Atlantic? It so happens that that one hour time difference is the difference between operating a narrow body plane like the Boeing 757 and a wide body like the 767. Simplicity of equipment is absolutely paramount. And when you go long haul, you have to have better food, service and entertainment. And probably a premium cabin of some kind.’
‘Pay-per-frill,’ such as charging for priority boarding, and disembarking, in-flight use of mobile phones, extra legroom and baggage allowance, and gourmet meals, might be the answer for both airlines and passengers. Look out for hybrid premium seats or cabins, not as fancy (or pricey) as the all-singing-all-dancing ergonomic lie-flat sleeper seats in first and business-class cabins of the big name carriers, but at least as comfortable as those old first class seats in the narrow body Boeing 707s and DC 8s back in the late 1960s, before business class was invented. Following perhaps in the tradition of the much lamented Canadian carrier, Ward Air (long since subsumed by Air Canada) that had a ‘Big Seat’ option on long-haul routes between Canada and Europe. Everyone got the same service, but you could opt to pay extra for a larger, more comfortable, seat. ]
I spoke first with Azran Osman-Rani, CEO of Air Asia X:, and then Tony Fernandes, AirAsia group CEO.
R.C: There are various business models for ‘no-frills,’ ‘low-cost’ and ‘budget’ that are sometimes hard to define; then you get so-called ‘hybrid’ carries – a sort of segmentation within the low-cost category. What sort of model is Air Asia on this particular route?
A.O-R: I joined AirAsia a year and a half ago to start AirAsia X – a separate company that does long-haul services – operationally, we’re one and the same and we have one consumer brand which is Air Asia, but Tony has kept us as a separate entity because he did not want to expose AirAsia’s public shareholders to the different risk profile of long haul, which at that time was unproven compared to short haul – he wanted to use public shareholder funds to underpin the financing of AirAsia short haul operations.
As we started AirAsia X as a separate company, we were able to raise our own funding, buy our own planes, but we take advantage of the strength Air Asia has in terms of the brand and the network; we share the same pilots and crew, and ground handling… now, here’s Tony.
R.C: Successful no-frills carriers, such as Ryanair and EasyJet, have been based on the Southwest Airlines model, which is essentially point-to-point; single equipment; low overhead; low distribution costs – they pioneered on-line booking, and one-way pricing, which legacy carriers have been following; high aircraft turnaround and high utilization of capital; no interlining… Now this works for short haul, but can it work for long haul? Can you give me a rationale for the long haul? and how you are going to make it work?
T.F: Right now I think we are the only airline that is using our present model how does it work? Since we started everyone has said the long haul model doesn’t work for the all the reasons you have said. Now where we buck the trend is we take AirAsia and we put it on steroids and it becomes AirAsia X and it becomes high capacity, high utilization; we still do quick turnarounds, we’re not slaves to a timetable; so if you look at our London flight, we arrive at different times during the day so we maximize utilization. But the key is really the point-to-point; we’re not really point-to-point, though we operate as point-to-point. What does that mean? It means that when I fly from London to Kula Lumpur, the point-to-point traffic in KL may not be that large, but you now have a short haul network that’s second to none. You can go from KL to scores of destinations, like Bali, Phuket, Bangkok, Singapore and so on… So we marry the long haul with the short haul in what we think is a winning formula.
R.C: So you can interline?
T.F: We don’t actually practice the interlining policy; we have all the advantages without the costs…
R.C. Interlining is costly?
T.F: Correct. We’re like EasyJet; if you want to fly on you, have to have a separate ticket. We make it easy. For example, in our new terminal were building in KL, we have for the first time put in a transfer desk; and people coming off Azan’s planes can go to this desk and recheck in for their next flight. We will make it a form of interlining, but we’ll make it self-liquidating; i.e. if you say I don’t want to deal with my bags, can you put them on the next flight? then we will charge you for that service. So it’s still a menu of services, that are priced, so that you can virtually get a full service product. But you pay for it.
R.C: This a la carte pricing is now happening with the full service airlines; it started with baggage. I see it working for the consumer because if you just want a basic fare you get it; you think you’re getting free food or interline, but you’re not; it’s in the cost structure. I prefer to pay for my own champagne if I want it.
T.F: Correct. It’s inequitable; because the guy in front of you may drink three bottles; the guy behind you may be a teetotaler…
R.C: But tell me how it works.
T.F: You buy a base fare, a seat; change your ticket? No, you want to change anything, there are change fees and so on. We ask for discipline. Why? Because a lot of people will book a seat and then they don’t turn up. It’s a perishable product; when you don’t turn up we have very little time to sell it again, so we say, to maintain our low fares, our efficiency, we ask a little bit of discipline from you. One base fare, dynamically priced, based on demand. Our yield management is exactly like Ryanair or EasyJet. The best passenger in the crude sense, according to [Michael] O’Leary, is someone going to a funeral. Why? Because he has to get there. So you open a newspaper (you had no intention of going to KL), you see £99, you say, I’m going to go; that’s the discretionary market that we fill up using our low fares; then the middle market people, who had planned to take a trip; then the last minute travelers. We charge a bit more for them because we know they’re time sensitive.
So that’s how we work; maybe I’m a little bit biased. It’s been in my mind since I was a 13-year-old plane spotter at Heathrow. I’ve looked at how could we get people cheaper across from Europe to Asia; and I think that for £99 pounds, people will say, I was going to Spain, but now I’ll go to Bali. The same for people in Southeast Asia, who only dreamed of seeing Big Ben. There are three things people in Asia people are dying to see: the Queen, Big Ben, and a football match. It’s now a reality.
You buy your basic fare and get a 31-inch pitch; it’s a shell-back seat that slides down – we think it’s irritating when someone puts their seat back on you. We have a wonderful in flight system that costs you about £5; you pay for that and order from a choice of food on a touch screen; the order goes straight to the galley and crew will bring it out with drinks; it’s all there, comfort kits, extra blankets, order what you want, just swipe your card. I reckon you’d spend another £20 more on a 12-hour flight; one meal and a snack in between. You’re talking about £10 for food; maybe £5 for luggage.
You can also pay extra for a better seat; this could be an aisle seat, one by the emergency exit or by the bulkhead – allows you to stretch a bit more. Or it could be a completely better seat, the XL seat we call it, leather, fully reclining with more leg-room. It’s not a class. You see, that’s where complexity comes in; if I put in a class, then I have to have a separate check-in; people’s expectations are different, and your costs start creeping up. We have 30 XL seats on the Airbus A340 we’re leasing initially from Air Canada. Our load factor on those seats is about 65 percent.
Eventually, our configuration will be about 50 flat beds. Again, as a traveler I don’t care too much about the food; it is space and getting a good night’s sleep with really flat beds. One thing airlines screw up on is the duvet; they cut costs and put polyester and tiny pillows. We give you a really decent pillow and a decent blanket; that’s all inclusive in the seat cost – about £1,000 return.
So I keep the tradition; I’m not changing my model – I have high utilization; point-to-point, I don’t interline, don’t have a separate class; but we manage to tweak it without spoiling the operational efficiency, by giving customers a choice, so they can supplement it.
R.C. Would you call it a hybrid?
T.F: I’d like to say it isn’t actually, because I do think we’re in the traditions of Southwest Airlines; but I’d like to say we’ve been innovative, in being very religious to the model but finding ways to preserve the model. I sit down with Herb Kelleher of Southwest and he thinks what I’m saying is complete sacrilege. O’Leary would crucify me on the stake of low cost for abandoning the model. But I think one of the dangers of those guys is they don’t look at different ways of doing it. Jet Blue took out rows of seats, and put in live TV and all that, and putting in lounges. Or Air Tran having a business class; I don’t agree with that. But I think if you’re just stuck in your way for 40 years, then you do miss opportunities; one has to be evolving. But the core principles of the model are still there, although you can add value to that model.
R.C: How can you get fast turnaround on long haul?
T.F: We’re doing it. We’ve got 18 hours utilization; we’re turning around a 340 in about an hour right now; our 330 with 383 passengers we’re doing it in 55 minutes. An hour versus 25 minutes isn’t going to get you an extra flight to London. But let me tell you how we get it, how we differ from a traditional long-haul airline. One is if you look at our timetable. Everyone is flying at the same time every day; if I took a Malaysian Airlines flight, it would leave KL at 12 o’clock at night, arrive in London at six in the morning. Because of its integrity to its schedule, it would leave London about 11 o’clock in the morning and arrive back at KL at five; and then it wouldn’t leave again till 12. So in two days you lose 12 hours, because it doesn’t want its business class passengers getting up at six in the morning.
We’ll start off with five flights a week. But I’m going to look at London to KL as being a shuttle route. It sounds bizarre, but I really think I can get five, even seven flights a day. But I don’t want to scare the hell out of anyone. I’d say to them five times, but I really think we could do seven times a day; every three hours. Now why do I think that? Because I’m not just serving the UK market in Stansted; all my low cost brethren are there: Ryanair, EasyJet, Air Berlin, and whoever else survives this mess. So someone from Paris or Prague can fly over to Stansted, and take us to KL; and equally, someone from Malaysia can get over to Stansted with us, and travel on to Paris or wherever.
R.C: Will you do deals with them, with other low-cost carriers?
T.F: Well, I think eventually. Mind you, doing a deal with Michael O’Leary sounds a scary thought. Stelios though is a good friend; I started this airline based on Stelios, and yeah, Stelios is a much nicer person to deal with than O’Leary. I’ve got 600 million people in Asia I can promote to, so basically, I don’t think we need a formal tie up; because the Internet brings it all together anyway.
R.C: But why on earth are you launching at this particular time? Oasis, Zoom and others all going out of business?
T.F: What they did wrong was, number one, they didn’t have size; number two, they only had two or three planes; they didn’t have a brand like AirAsia. But the most important thing is they veered away from the low-cost model. Oasis had a business class with the same seating configuration as Singapore Airlines, and lounges. But the most important factor was, they didn’t have Air Asia’s short-haul network. When you arrive on KL with us, you’ve got the connectivity with us throughout Asia.
We have 100 destinations out of KL, and hubs in Bangkok and Jakarta, like Stelios in Europe. I think that’s the difference between us, plus we were religious to the model; we pack the seats in and made it as comfortable as possible.
R.C. What sort of load factors do you have to have for this?
T.F: Well, right now, fuel’s come down so much, so our load factors come down dramatically. Right now, at today’s oil price, for break-even we’re looking at 52 percent; with oil at $100 dollars, we’d be looking at about 65 percent; $150 dollars, we’re looking at 85 percent – at these fares.
R.C: Still, doing this in the credit crunch; why are you so optimistic?
T.F: I thrive on calamity; I thrive on the fact that everyone’s got their heads in a spin and don’t know what to do. And in a world of chaos, it’s the best time to capitalize and to build market share when everyone’s too busy looking after their own back sides; they’re not worried about what you do, all they’re saying is, this guy’s a lunatic, he will fail. So they leave us alone.
What I say, if anyone listens, is the best time to build a brand is during a recession, because everyone else has cut advertising. The worst time to cut your marketing budget is during a recession, because when you come out of the recession, your brand is very strong; those who survive will be very strong. So it’s the easiest thing to cut, that’s correct, but it’s the worst thing, and you sometimes can’t see the effects of the brand building, you know, to the bottom line. I have daily battles with my controller who says, why don’t you take a quarter page ad instead of a full page? But we thrive on this; we’re contrarian, we believe people want to travel, that we have good news and this will stimulate travel.
R.C: What about other routes?
T.F: The big question is, whether I put all my eggs into Stansted, and use that as the base into Europe; or whether we split and say, okay, let’s have one in Stansted, one in central Europe, and one in eastern Europe. I would probably say the latter. So we’d look at somewhere in southern Europe or central Europe. And I’m a big believer in eastern Europe; I believe the Poles, and the Czechs, and the Slovaks would love to come to our part of the world; and we would love to go to their part of the world.
Call me any time. I would love to pick your brains.
London, Dec. 2008
‘You’ve checked in, and printed your boarding card with your seat assignment online; fantastic. You then need to check your bag with an agent; go through passport control; join the queue at security; then present the boarding card and an ID when you board the plane. Each of these processes is being done in self-service mode somewhere in the world. We are trying to corral these to deliver a program to speed the progress of passengers through the airport.’
This is how Paul Behan, program manager for fast travel, at the International Air Transport Association in Geneva, talks about his mission.
Baggage, for example: you first need to register that you intend to check one, two or more bags, either on the Web or a self-service kiosk at the airport. Then you ‘self-tag’ your bags.
‘That’s what is happening in Scandinavia, Germany and Canada; getting the bag to the point ready to go,’ Behan says. ‘You still need an agent for airline liability and security sides, but you can cut the process to about 20 seconds as opposed to the couple of minutes it takes now. However, some pilots are going on in Europe, such as Schiphol, for a totally unmanned baggage drop facility.’
If your bags don’t make it to the other end, instead of standing in line for an agent, you will fill in the data at a kiosk, or an Internet work station, in the baggage hall, print a receipt, and leave without seeing anyone.
The next stage to printing out the boarding card at home will be to check in with your cell phone, or use it as a postbox for a Web check-in. Check in the night before and send it to your mobile. According to Behan, ten airlines enable mobile phone check-in with IATA bar-coded boarding passes.
Cell phones can lessen the misery of hanging around the airport waiting for a delayed flight.
Imagine a snow storm over Chicago with a hundreds of delayed or canceled flights; standing in line at the desk for an agent to help you.
‘We’re looking at mobile technology to send a message to the passenger saying, don’t turn up at the airport at two o’clock but at four; and by the way, here’s your new boarding pass. This is a reality today,’ Behan says. ‘You’ll also be able to use your mobile device as a boarding pass; saves you having to print a bit of paper.’
‘The next step is boarding the plane. In Japan, Scandinavia and Germany, they’re implementing self-boarding gates,’ Behan adds. ‘Think of your metro station. You’ll present your boarding pass either as a piece of paper or mobile with a bar code. There are some challenges with passport checks at the gate; but we are working on that.’
Baggage is the number one reason why travelers do not use self-service options, according to a survey by SITA, a Geneva-based airline communications provider, conducted at six of the world’s busiest airports.
SITA Air Transport World Passenger Self-Service Survey examined the attitudes and habits of a representative sample of the 232 million passengers who use seven international airports: Hartsfield-Jackson, Atlanta; Mumbai International; Charles-de-Gaulle, Paris; Moscow Domodedovo; Sao Paulo Guarulhos and Johannesburg. Interviews with 2,143 travelers representing more than 60 nationalities flying on more than 100 airlines were made at the departure gates during April and May 2008.
The survey confirms that self-service is part of full-service expectations; and airlines are responding with technology giving travelers greater convenience, with power to control their airport experience. Only price (70.5 percent) and flight schedule (63.1 percent) rank above ‘ability to make your own arrangements on the Web’ (42.5 percent).
Overall, 57.6 percent of respondents booked their flight on line, while 36 percent checked in on the Web or at a self-service kiosk. ‘Ease of use’ (72 percent) and ‘time saved’ (60 percent) were the most popular reasons for online booking - plus the fact that the Web makes comparison of the various options easier (56 percent).
‘Baggage is the reason stated by almost half (48.4 percent) of people as the reason for not using self-service check ins when it is available,’ says Dominique El Bez, SITA director, portfolio marketing, ‘seriously detracting from the passenger experience, and limiting the savings and efficiencies made possible by self-service technology. Addressing the baggage dilemma is a key milestone towards achieving our target of 80 percent self-service check-in.’
According to the survey, 47.8 percent of travelers would be willing to use both remote check-in and bag-drop services in the future, and 42.2 percent of them would be willing to pay for them.
A majority of respondents (66.7 percent) would welcome more online functions such as the ability to modify reservations. The ability to use kiosks for flight transfers would be welcomed by 53.8 percent, and for reporting lost baggage claims by 41.8 percent.
The number of travelers willing to use airline Web sites to frequently book other travel components, such as hotels and car rental, is expected to ‘almost double in the coming years’ from the present 11.2 percent.
‘Automated border control and security processing’ would be acceptable to 48.7 percent, while a ‘weighted average’ of 40 percent of travelers would accept the idea of airlines or airports using ‘location sensing technology to guide them through the terminal.’
This is ‘Big Brother’ territory. Radio Frequency Identification Tags linked with a network of high resolution CCTV panoramic cameras around an airport can track the location of any passenger with an accuracy of one square meter, enabling authorities to keep an eye on suspicious individuals, find lost children, ensure that passengers arrive at the gate in time to board their planes, and help evacuate airports in an emergency.
RFID chips work by emitting a short radio message when interrogated by an electronic tag reader. Passengers might be given a wrist band or a boarding pass embedded with a unique ID, cross-referenced to information on the reservations system, such as name and flight number.
The highest acceptance of the idea among respondents was in Sao Paulo (69 percent); the lowest in Paris Charles-de-Gaulle (four percent).
Can large airports ever be user friendly? Perhaps the oxymoron is too grotesque. But self-service technology is helping to make the airport experience less of a nightmare, giving travelers more control over their journey.
The International Air Transport Association (IATA), and Airports Council International (ACI), are campaigning for a range of options, such as mobile-phone check-in, self-tagging of baggage; common-use check-in kiosks; self-boarding gates, and self-service processing of passports and ID cards, and fast-track options for pre-screened travelers to whiz through immigration and customs, using biometric identification data like DNA, ear lobes, retina or iris patterns, voice patterns, hand geometry, and good old-fashioned finger prints.
Boarding passes that carry a bar-code instead of the usual magnetic strip can be printed direct from your computer before you arrive at the airport, so that you do not even need to go to a check-in kiosk, but proceed direct to the departure gate.
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips will help to solve the problem of mishandled and lost baggage, according to SITA, a not-for-profit provider of communications systems to airlines, saving the industry up to $1 billion per year in delayed flight departures and mishandled baggage.
James Cherry, chief executive of Montreal-Trudeau International Airport, who is at the forefront of the technological
Revolution, believes that user-friendliness means getting several things right.
‘We’ve had this as our primary focus since we modernized the airport seven years ago,’ Cherry says. ’We have been asking people their opinion, 1,800 every quarter, looking at 75 different variables that they think are important - and how they think we are doing. And we are doing better and better all the time. The most important things are security, a sense of security, good signage and communications, availability and politeness of staff, and fluidity of movement through the airport.’
‘People can check in on their PDAs, Blackberries, and get their boarding passes; we’re quite innovative in things like that,’ Cherry adds. ‘Getting through security is not bad; we had long lines like everybody else, but ours are quite manageable; we’ve dedicated ample space to search points and focus not on average wait time but on wait times at the peak periods. It doesn’t matter how long it takes at 10 in the morning; what matters is the time you go through at rush hour.’
Montreal has installed technology such as check-in kiosks; self-tagging baggage and bag drops; Nexus program that allows pre-approved Canadian residents or citizens, and U.S. citizens to clear customs and immigration is seconds, with iris recognition.
Cherry is impressed with other airports that go out of their ways to smooth the way for travelers: Vancouver; Copenhagen, Munich (’terrific);’ Zurich (’reasonably good in serving the customers’); Kuala Lumpur; Inchon in Korea (’these guys are going out of their way to improve the customer experience’).
‘The real frustration, the real challenge we have is trying to serve our customers without having complete control and influence over all aspects of service, Cherry says.’
‘A couple of simple examples,’ Cherry continues. ‘Check-in process: if you’re dealing with airline staff; we give them all the facilities they need, but sometimes they don’t staff the counters properly, and people have to wait in line; and the same thing with customs. We have a very large customs hall with 26 posts, but sometimes they are only half staffed, although they know the schedules, arrival patterns, what loads are coming. If they don’t meet the staffing, the airport looks bad. I’ve been blamed for things you wouldn’t imagine. You have to count on the support of other people. And we get crucified sometimes because the wait line in customs is 45 minutes, when our target is 20 minutes at peak time.’
The secret of success may be that Montreal-Trudeau is run by a private not-for-profit organization.
‘We are self-financing; we pay rent to the government and make our own investments, and any surplus has to be reinvested in the airport - no shareholders to get the benefits,’ Cherry says.
‘We are constantly trying to maintain a balance between making enough money to make ends met, and reinvest, making it a good deal for the airlines that operate here; maximizing the quality of service, and being very respectful of the environment. We can’t let one or the other get out of whack, letting the others suffer.’
A small glitch as glitches go: Stuck in the departure lounge at Gatwick Airport for a frustrating 40 minutes waiting to board our EasyJet flight while the jetway to the door of the plane was being repaired. EasyJet apologized for the delay; but it was the airport’s fault. Had we missed our take-off slot, no doubt we would have blamed the airline.
When things go wrong at airports, everyone is quick to blame everyone else. Airlines blame airport authorities or air traffic congestion, along with civil aviation policy; airport management blames customs, immigration and security staff, over whom they have little or no control; and travelers are as likely to blame an airline as an airport, or anyone else in range, when things go awry.
“Airlines would love to be able to control the whole customer experience but they can’t,” said Jean-Claude Baumgarten, president of the World Travel & Tourism Council. “Whoever runs the airport has the responsibility but not the overall control. That is the problem that needs thinking about.”
This sentiment is echoed by James Cherry, president and CEO of Montreal-Trudeau International Airport, which is at the forefront of self-service technology, such as check-in kiosks, self-boarding gates, fast-track options for prescreened travelers, self-tagging of baggage and mobile-phone check-in.
“The real frustration, the real challenge we have, is trying to serve our customers without having complete control and influence over all aspects of service,” Cherry said.
“Check-in, for example. We give airlines all the facilities they need, but sometimes they don’t staff the counters properly, and people have to wait in line; the same thing with customs. We have a very large customs hall with 26 posts, but sometimes they are only half staffed, although they know the schedules, arrival patterns, what loads are coming. If they don’t meet the staffing, the airport looks bad.”
Montreal-Trudeau’s fast-track program called NEXUS, based on iris and fingerprint recognition, allows pre-approved Canadian residents or citizens, as well as U.S. citizens, to clear customs and immigration in about 30 seconds if they have only hand baggage.
“Business passengers can check in on their PDAs, like BlackBerrys, and get their boarding passes; so we’re quite innovative in things like that,” Cherry said.
Cherry interviews 1,800 customers every quarter, tracking their impressions of the airport, and how well they think it is doing, based on 75 variables.
“And we are doing better all the time,” Cherry said. The most important factors are security and a sense of safety, clear signs and communications, the availability and presence of staff, the treatment of people with respect and the fluidity of movement through the airport.
Cherry is active in the Airports Council International, a trade organization that he says is focusing increasingly on customer service - giving awards to airports that do a good job. Personally, he has been “impressed and inspired” by things he has seen in other airports, like Vancouver, Copenhagen, Munich, Zurich, Kuala Lumpur and Inchon in Korea.
Unlike some airports, where shareholders’ interest in profit is arguably inimical to the public interest, Montreal-Trudeau Airport is an unusual form of a privately-held, not-for-profit organization. It is run by a board of 15 directors, including representatives from the federal and provincial governments and local municipalities, and businesspeople.
“The Canadian model, when we were privatized in 1992, was to lease the airport to not-for-profit organizations,” Cherry said. “We are independent financially, pay rent to the government and make our own investments; any surplus has to be reinvested in the airport itself - there are no shareholders to benefit.
“If we wanted to have the best customer service in the world, we’d have to pour more money in,” Cherry added. “But if we wanted to have the best financial result, the easiest way would be to cut back on customer service. We are constantly trying to find the optimum balance between making enough money to make ends meet, and reinvest, and making it a good deal for the airlines that operate here; maximizing the quality of service, and being very respectful of the environment. I believe that being not-for-profit gives us that balance. “
Who would have thought that the premium class airline cabin could be the inspiration behind a radical new concept in hotel design? But Yotel ‘capsule hotels’ in the South Terminal at Gatwick Airport Terminal 4 at Heathrow, and soon at Amsterdam Schiphol, have cabin-like rooms with a bed that turns into a sofa, pull-down desk, a fold away chair and a flat-screen TV, free WiFi Internet access, and ‘techno-wall’ entertainment system. Cabin crews serve drinks and light meals 24 hours a day from a galley.
Yotels are a refuge for travelers who want a cheap and cheerful place to lay their head for a few hours at any time of the day or night. Ideal if you have an early flight, a hefty wait in transit, or time to kill before a meeting.
Prices for standard cabins range from #25, or about $50, for a minimum four-hour stay and #55 for a 10-hour (overnight) stay, while premium cabins cost #40 for four hours, and around #82 overnight. Cabins can be booked on line at www.yotel.com.
Yotel is the brainchild of Simon Woodroffe, 55, a British entrepreneur, founder of the Yo! Sushi chain of Japanese fast-food restaurants in London, Paris and the Middle East. (While hotel chains with pod-like rooms catering to short-term and mobile guests are opening elsewhere, Yotel differs because it is actually part of the airport.)
“I had the idea during a flight from Kuwait to London on British Airways when I was upgraded to first class,” Woodroffe says. “I went to sleep thinking how one could make the idea of a Japanese capsule hotel acceptable in the West. The solution is something like this BA cabin. All I needed to do was to find the designers and ask them to help me design a hotel. We’ve used the design language of airlines, how to make the best of a very small space, and some of the technology of luxury yachts, to create our cabin system - a proper room and bed with all the facilities you’d expect in a four-star hotel room, but miniaturized. And at a budget price.”
‘The holy grail of retailing - and hotels are retail outlets,’ Woodroffe adds, is to bring to everyone what rich people have. At Yo! Sushi we have media people, business suits, MTV kids, and ladies who lunch, all enjoying the same experience side by side. It’s about being young at heart.’
Check-in at Yotel is like checking in for a flight at a self-service kiosk. Swipe your credit card and receive a key-card to your cabin. Check out in much the same way.
Premium cabins (10 square meters) feature a double bed (2 meters by 1.3 meters) that deploys to a sofa at the touch of a button, like a first-class sleeper seat; a one-meter-square desk, folding out of the ‘techno-wall,’ with a retractable chair and storage for baggage; a 58-centimeter TV; free Internet access; and a bathroom behind a sliding glass screen with an overhead rain shower, hairdryer and “soft towels.”
Standard cabins (7 square meters) feature a single bed (2 meters-by-one-meter ), a 50-centimeter TV, free Internet access, fold-out desk and stool, and bathroom.
A nine-hour stay in a Yotel premium cabin for #75 seems a bargain compared with #4,250 for a one-way flight in first class with British Airways from London to New York - except that you do get fine dining and transportation thrown in.
Jo Berrington, marketing director at Yotel in London, says, ‘We are aiming at people with an extremely early morning flight who might arrive at nine to 10 pm the night before and just need a bed for the night; or those with a long transit wait of up to four hours, or arriving early in the morning off a long-haul flight who need somewhere to rest and shower, and who do not have use of an airline arrivals lounge.’
Look out now for airlines entering the hotel business with “flights on the ground” featuring sleeper seats in their individual, waist-high pods with the latest gizmos, superb airline cuisine, lavatories-on-demand, simulated aircraft noise and optional turbulence.
The pitch might be something like: A night in London for half the cost of a one-way first-class fare to New York. With no jetlag, just a restless night.
Like most frequent travelers in Europe and the rest of the world, I’ve been sucked into believing that this brave new world of ticketless electronic travel would be the best thing for travelers since putting wheels and handles on luggage. Certainly easier than the process of showing my passport from one country to the next. The world of ticketless seemed to promise an easier time traveling. Yea, right. Now that I’ve joined the masses and have been exposed to this phenomenon, I’m here to say that ticketless travel might save a few trees (and yes, I’m all for that), but it doesn’t do much for making travel easier.
Case in point. In times past, I’d get my ticket and boarding pass from my travel agent and on short trips, head directly for the gate and when they called priority boarding, I would jostle with a few others and be in my seat with little fuss and no muss. My only concern might be a flight delay. Now enter this wonderful thing called ticketless electronic travel. You don’t have to worry about losing your ticket, etc. Big deal. In nine years of flying hundreds of trips to every conceivable place I could talk to people about miles and points, I never came close to losing my ticket. So, here I go. Yes, I’m just taking carry-on luggage, but to the end of a long line I go to “check-in” for my flight, having to pull out my photo ID and passport which is in my wallet alongside my elite level frequent flyer card. Ten minutes later, I’ve got my “fine print” and instructions to go to the gate to get my boarding pass. Now, here’s the dilemma. If I leisurely visit any of the merchants in the main terminal (no time for duty free), I’m risking that higher number for boarding purposes. No shopping today, got to get to the gate. Once at the gate, there’s a real long line to get my boarding pass. 15 minutes later I become passenger 107. At this point they have no idea if I’ve paid full fare or discount, flew them 100 times or only once, I’m just passenger 107. My profile with the elite level frequent flyer program I have in my wallet knows I like aisle forward and even has an area of the plane I can sit with others who exhibit a great loyalty to that one airline. Anyway, in waves of ten passengers at a time, we board. Those of us who aren’t in the habit of being at the airport 2 hours prior to flight (this is only a one hour and fifteen minute flight) know what’s ahead of us. I find solitude in seat B in row 22. As I settle down for my flight, I can’t help but wonder if there is anyone else out there like me less interested in worrying about losing my ticket, but more interested in standing in less lines and making my airline experience a little less challenging. But just as the pilot reminds me to buckle up for safety and one of my seatmates decides to grab a sandwich out of his backpack, I repeat to myself so that no one can hear… I hate ticketless travel.