Southwest to transform AirTran hub into ‘megacity’ – Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I was asked what might happen when Southwest takes over the Atlanta operation for AirTran. Small cities might be most at risk.

Keep your shoes on at the airport? Maybe – CNN Out of the Office
There’s talk of you being able to keep your shoes on through security. I’m not getting my hopes up.

Getting your money’s worth in business class – BBC Passport Blog
I was asked about which airlines and flights to take to get that flat bed in business class.

In the Trenches: Missing Something Good – Intuit Small Business Blog
I get a lot of unsolicited emails, and that makes it tougher to find those that matter.

Seems like a funny move – Icelandair will start flying from Denver to Iceland next year. Is this planning gone crazy, or is it a smart effort to capture one stop travelers to Europe from cities with limited nonstop flights?

I’ve finished up my week at APEX, and it was a great one. That being said, I have a ton of stuff to sort through for future posts, so I’ll be pretty busy until next week. Today, I’ve got a guest post from Henry Harteveldt on Google’s new flight search.
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Two days ago, Google unveiled a new flight search function. Following its successful acquisition of ITA Software, Google’s move was expected — only the timing remained unknown. But after a bit of testing, I think Google launched the product too soon. Since you never get a second chance to make a first impression, I don’t think Google did itself any favors by launching it when it did.

Like Kayak, Fly.com, Hipmunk and other similar “meta-search” websites, Google’s new flight search function allows a user to search and compare airline schedules and prices. Google’s flight search certainly offers several benefits:

• Convenience. Google is the most-used search engine, and adding flight search will only serve to increase the site’s utility to its users. As an advertising-based business, this obviously stands to benefit Google enormously as well — more people using more pages, spending more time on Google.
• Page download speed. Once I’d selected my travel dates, Google returned results almost instantly. A search on Kayak produced a calendar on the right-side of the page showing the best available fares, but users must wait several seconds (six to eight seconds, in my tests) for all the actual flight results to be returned.
• Proactive filters. Google’s flight search allows users to filter by both price and travel time. Both of these are smart. Research I did in my previous job shows that a large number of US online leisure travelers — likely the primary audience for this application — allow price to dictate their first-choice destination. The travel time filter is helpful (if not original — Travelmuse.com first offered this at least three years ago) for travelers who want to avoid long flights, especially if they’re taking a long weekend getaway and want to maximize their time at their destination.
• Integrated — though slow — booking. After a user has selected both outbound and return flights, a red “Book” button appears (beneath that is an ad for the airline, read on to see how that will play out). Clicking on it will take the user to airline’s website where he or she may proceed to complete the reservation. In my experiences, though, it routinely took eight seconds or more for the airline website page to appear (I didn’t encounter other delays using the Internet or my web browser — Google Chrome — while waiting for the airline page to load).

That said, as analyst I think Google jumped the gun in bringing this product to market. Why?

• Poor presence on launch day. Hint: If you’re going to tout that you’re bringing something to market, it’s usually a smart idea to let users find it. I did 10 searches on Google.com using the suggested “flights from [city] to [city]” phrase. None produced the “flights” link in the left-side navigation menu, as illustrated on Google’s blog. The “flights” link did appear in the searches I conducted today, September 14. Nitpicky? Maybe No. If you’re going to bring a product to market and tout it, make sure your users can consistently find and use it.
• A clunky map. If there’s anything Google knows besides search, it’s mapping. Google offers two nice features on its flight search map. First, it shows the prices for the destinations based on selected travel dates. Second, the departure airport shows an icon of a plane taking off, while the destination city shows a plane landing. After that, though, Google — surprisingly — disappoints. It’s not at all clear how a user interacts with the map. To change origin and destination cities, a natural response would be to try to move the icons around on the map. That doesn’t work — doing so shifts the map in the window. To adjust the destination city on the map, a user must click a different city. To change the departure airport, users must change the “from” city in the flight search box.

• Incomplete flight search results. Not all airlines serving a city-pair were returned. For example, a search for San Francisco-Washington DC (all airports) returned results for United, but no other airline. With a 6 1/2 hour flight duration, Virgin America’s (VX) San Francisco-Washington/Dulles nonstops should have been included (VX schedules those flights for roughly 5 hours, 10 minutes). On other searches, like Oakland-Houston, Southwest’s (WN)flights didn’t appear. I can understand not showing WN’s fares, but not its schedules, especially since media presented WN flight results. A San Francisco-LA search returned flights for American and United, but not Delta. A Delta.com search showed 11 flights southbound, nine flights northbound on the same travel dates.

• Uninspired user sort controls. I give Google credit for allowing users to sort flight results by airline alliances — that can be very helpful, especially for international flight searches. But the other controls are fairly standard — number of stops, connecting airport, and departure and return flight times. This site has nothing on either Kayak or Hipmunk, whose user controls are more visible. Yawn.
• A display that emphasizes airline commoditization. Yes, this is a new product. Yes, airline pricing is complex. But airlines are working hard to differentiate themselves, and Google’s flight display does nothing to help them. Google presents the least expensive economy-class fare. Nothing wrong with that, but Kayak presents premium economy fares. Airlines like United and Virgin America can’t merchandise their premium economy offerings on Google’s flight search tool. Carriers that offer amenities like in-flight Wi-Fi, in-seat power, or in-seat audio/video entertainment systems can’t promote those items in the tool, either. Hipmunk shows users which flight have Wi-Fi. These items are important to distinguishing elements for the airlines. Not offering at least some merchandising capabilities at its start places Google tangibly behind its competitors.

When a firm introduces what is essentially a “me too” product, its launch should incorporate enough bells and whistles to create a distinctive, compelling experience to encourage switching. As of now, Google’s flight search may be convenient, but it’s far from compelling.

Finally, there’s been a lot of buzz about how the flight search shows only airline websites. Cranky Flier readers no doubt know that airlines would like to increase their direct sales, primarily via their websites — their lowest-cost sales channel — rather than selling tickets through travel agencies. Don’t expect this to last. Remember that:

• Google is a publicly-held firm. Like all publicly-held firms, Wall Street and investors expect growth in gross income and operating and net profits each quarter.
• To help generate those revenues and profits Google sells advertising. Travel is a prime category. Within that category, online travel agencies (OTAs) like Expedia, Orbitz, Priceline, and Travelocity are major customers.
• The OTAs generally have larger marketing budgets than the airlines. Both Expedia and Priceline have large cash balances, and have — or have had — larger market valuations than many airlines.

The OTAs will not allow themselves to be frozen out of Google’s flight search display. The OTAs are authorized agents of the airlines, so I don’t see how Google can prohibit them from participating in a public channel like its flight search tool. Plus, if consumers are not provided the same choice in shopping channels on Google’s flight search engine that they find elsewhere, Google will not get the traffic it seeks. Bear in mind that Kayak started as an airline-focused price aggregator, and then added OTAs as a booking option. That move must have worked, otherwise would have stopped it.

I understand, and respect, why airlines may not care to have OTAs compete with them in this channel. I don’t expect airlines to sit idly by, either. In talking with carriers, I get the impression that some may be willing to pay Google referral fees for users who book through their websites. Of course, it’s possible the OTAs may pay more. The OTAs can subsidize paying a larger referral fee on air tickets to a meta-search site, since they can recoup that by selling other travel products like hotels or insurance, to the air traveler. Though airlines sell third-party products, they don’t generate the same volume of those products as the OTAs.

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Henry Harteveldt is a co-founder of Atmosphere Research Group, where he leads its airline and travel research practice. Prior to starting Atmosphere earlier this month, Henry spent more than 11 1/2 years as the airline and travel analyst at Forrester Research, Inc.

Who wants to help me plan my trip to New York this weekend? If you have a Facebook account, log on to Trippy and help. (Use beta code “cranky” to get access.)

Trippy launched in beta yesterday, and I’m happy to be a member of the advisory council. One of the reasons I really like the advisory council idea is that Trippy is looking for real feedback to make it a better site. They’ve reached out to me and others to try to get some real usage going. So, hop on and take it for a test drive.

The idea is one you’ve heard before – it’s all about social travel planning. Sounds like a bunch of buzzword-y, but it makes sense. If I go on to many sites, I’ll just get unfiltered reviews. Why do that when I can just ask people in my network?

Of course, the problem is that I don’t want to push my friends to sign up for a new site and then make them leave a bunch of detailed reviews. That can be a real pain, so that’s why I like Trippy.

You can login with Facebook Connect, so you don’t have to sign up for yet another username and password. (If you don’t use Facebook this isn’t good, and I’ve already passed that feedback on.) You can also help me with my trip pretty easily. It doesn’t require a long review or anything like that.

So let’s take a test spin using my trip to NYC this week. Take a look and see if you can help make some recommendations.

And of course, please leave your comments about the site here. What needs to be fixed? What would make it more usable? Anything you can add will go directly to the guys at Trippy. Can’t beat having a direct feedback line like that.

In the interest of full disclosure, as always, I do get compensation for participating on the board. Still, I wouldn’t do it at all if I didn’t think there was something to it.

Check it out and see what you think.

Greetings from Seattle. It’s a busy week here at the Airline Passenger Experience Association (APEX) 2011 Expo. I’ll be writing about several things over the next couple weeks, but I wanted to start with the award which I helped judge. This year, Air New Zealand won the award for the Best Single Achievement in the Passenger’s Experience with the intro of the SkyCouch.

So why did we pick Air New Zealand? I can’t speak for all the judges, but I do like to give a little more rationale on why I personally picked Air New Zealand as the winner.

This award honestly was a little tricky. APEX used to be the WAEA and focused on inflight entertainment. Now with the broader focus on passenger experience, there was a much bigger pool of candidates. By the time we got to judge, it had been narrowed down to five finalists.

• Air New Zealand for the SkyCouch
• Delta for @DeltaAssist on Twitter
• FlyDubai for the Lumexis inflight entertainment system
• Virgin America for paid upgrades while on the aircraft
• Virgin Atlantic for its new Jam inflight entertainment system

We judged on four categories – Innovation, Sustainability, Benefit to the Passenger, and Benefit to the Airline Industry. These guys were all deserving of being in the finals, but for me, the toughest choice was between Air New Zealand and Delta.

For those who don’t know, the SkyCouch was introduced late last year when Air New Zealand decided to offer 3 coach seats on the side of the cabin that can be turned into a flat bed-like space. It’s not a great bed for people to stretch out (that’s was biz class is for), but it’s great for families, especially with small kids. It was also accompanied by new meal options and inflight entertainment, much with kids in mind.

@DeltaAssist is Delta’s creation of a Twitter channel that allows it to provide real time customer service and then communicate throughout the organization.

Both of these are excellent, so how did I end up going with Air New Zealand?

Really all the finalists were sustainable, so that wasn’t an issue this late in the judging process. It was the other three categories required some serious and thoughtful deliberation. We spent quite a bit of time working through this – it was actually a lot of fun.

Benefit to the Passenger
@DeltaAssist provides a new way to get quick customer service responses, so that’s a big benefit. Right now, I imagine it’s a lot of tech-savvy 20 and 30 somethings, but it’s bound to grow beyond that as people learn how useful it can be when they need help.

On Air New Zealand, coach passengers now have a way to get more comfortable on long haul flights, but it’s not just the seat. It’s the way that the airline has focused on creating new food options for adults and children. It’s the entirely new kids experience with inflight entertainment as well. It’s the whole package.

The result is happier coach passengers for a variety of reasons. It’s adults who can get somewhat more comfortable than in a normal coach seat. It’s also kids who might actually sleep on an airplane. Happy kids mean happy parents, and that also means other passengers are happy on the airplane if kids aren’t screaming.

This also should spur further innovation in the back of the bus, and that could make this an even bigger achievement. According to Air New Zealand, the SkyCouch has been a real success commercially. The airline can now show that there is a way to improve the passenger experience and make money doing it in coach. Others have noticed and that can only be good for passengers.

Benefit to the Airline Industry
Air New Zealand appears to have found a way to increase revenue in coach by providing a unique product. That’s a big win in an industry that often looks at coach like it’s a commodity. It’s easy to come up with ideas, but it’s not easy to see them to fruition and then actually make them a success.

@DeltaAssist, meanwhile, can help increase productivity of customer service reps while providing a strong brand benefit. It also can help fix travel problems before they become big problems. It’s also a big win.

Innovation
So for me it really came down to innovation as the differentiator. What Delta is doing is excellent and it is innovative for sure, but on the innovation scale, the SkyCouch is off the charts. It is a brand new, incredibly creative idea that required a great deal of risk-taking. And it paid off.

The willingness of Air New Zealand to put money and effort into developing something like this is impressive. It has improved the passenger experience for Air New Zealand’s customers, and it might just provide the catalyst airlines around the world need to put more resources into the coach cabin.