When I first saw the article by Joe Sharkey in the New York Times today “Airborne Wi-Fi May Soar Despite All the Doubters”, I was filled with optimism. I remember as far back as six years ago using Wi-Fi on a business class flight to Europe and being delighted to get through so much additional work, and also do some last minute logistics with the group I was visiting.
So of course I was sorry to see it removed a year or two later when people said the airlines wouldn’t recoup their investment.
Now, even though the cost Sharkey reports is at least $100,000 per plane to install Wi-Fi, I was a little bit shocked to hear the thinking on how they will recoup their costs this time, charging the individual for the use. I was just having a similar conversation with the manager of the new Pan Pacific Hotel in Seattle. For a traveler, a hotel room has some similarities to a flight. I am already committed to the flight or the room, I have already agreed to pay their fee, and while I spent some time looking for the best fee, I didn’t spend a huge amount of time on it.
So when I am sitting on a flight, or in a hotel room and I have to go through a series of screens and sometimes provide my credit card number for a $15 or even $25 fee (some hotels offer a cheaper daily rate if you pay for two nights instead of one), I get grumpy. I get grumpy because I feel nickel-and-dimed, and because it’s a hassle to go through that additional transaction, which is going to be a hassle again when I go to fill in my expense report. While I suspect some people aren’t this way, but if the fee were baked into the room rate or the flight rate, I wouldn’t notice or care at the $15 or $25 difference, and it certainly wouldn’t change my choice of flight or hotel. For those who care, add a checkbox at the point of reservation to indicate whether you want to pay for it and then make the wireless access code the same as the confirmation number we use to check in for our flight. This isn’t as hard as they are making it.
This is a “how” trap for the airlines where they are looking at adding an incremental service and they want to recoup that expense in an incremental, transactional way. Think of the customer and their experience, and what matters to them, and you might just find that the solution pays you back a lot faster than the transactional way you are thinking about.
The same goes for hotels, by the way, which is why I was talking with the Pan Pacific. Put yourself in the shoes of the customer, or even ask them what they care about and what they don’t care about, and I expect you will find you need to do some rethinking on these ticky-tacky transactional items.
-Ric
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