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I know, I know. It’s yet another onboard wifi story, right? Lufthansa has started putting internet on its airplanes and expects to have it on its whole long haul flight by the end of 2011. So why is this interesting? A couple of reasons, actually. I do find it really interesting the way that Lufthansa is working to bring air and ground together in a couple of ways, including the introduction of CloudStream. Here’s the default CloudStream playlist.

Now, it’s no surprise that Lufthansa is the first to bring back real broadband internet over the oceans. Lufthansa was really aggressive at doing it when Boeing first launched Connexion back in the day. But then, Connexion shut down and Lufthansa just kept flying around with a bunch of sad, useless antennas. So when Panasonic resurrected a new effort at onboard satellite wifi, Lufthansa jumped at it, especially since it could use some of the hardware it was stuck with from before.

The first flights were up and running with wifi on December 1. Lufthansa is starting with Frankfurt to JFK, Detroit, and Atlanta. Yeah, I know. I wondered about Detroit as well, but it’s just because the A330 is the first airplane to get the service, so those routes get it first. If you’re flying on an A330 before January 31, it’s free so check it out.

But what’s different about this versus, say, the stuff you can get domestically. It uses the same satellite as Row 44 (the one Southwest is installing), but it’s also more robust. For example, Lufthansa will allow people to use GSM/GPRS to use their mobiles to text message and surf the web that way. For me, the most interesting thing about this is how Lufthansa is integrating it with the ground.

The service is being handled by Deutsche Telekom (better known as T-Mobile’s parent, here in the US). So it’s really like it’s just another hotspot. Because of that, you can pay using miles, roaming agreements, or just with a credit card. There are a ton of options.

The pricing seems a little screwy to me, however. You have two options – either one hour of service or 24 hours of service. The one hour option is €10.95 (~$14.50) or 3,500 miles while the 24 hour option is €19.95 (~$26.40) or 7,000 miles.

First of all, let’s all just agree that the mileage option is shockingly dumb. I mean, it’s not dumb for Lufthansa to offer it, but it’s really dumb if you as a passenger choose it. The return on that is right around 0.3 cents per mile. In a world where most people benchmark 2 cents per mile as a good place to start, this is really throwing your miles away. But then there are the two options.

For one hour, $15 seems mighty steep. I guess the idea is to try to upsell you to the higher plan, but maybe this will change after testing. Chances are, if you only want one hour on a long haul flight, you simply want to do an email upload/download to reconnect with the world. So they should do something like 30 minutes for €5 for that purpose and then just go with an all-you-can-eat for 24 hours plan.

That plan, by the way, seems to be priced fairly to me. If you’re on an 8 to 12 hour flight, $25 for internet the entire time is absolutely worthwhile. I know that if I flew on Lufthansa, that’s the plan I’d choose. But the really cool thing is how they connect this with the ground experience.

Since it’s run by Deutsche Telekom, the 24 hour period isn’t just for access on the airplane. You can also access on the ground in the lounge. Not sure if you can use your access at any hotspot run by the company, but if so that makes it even more valuable.

Lufthansa has also put together this thing called CloudStream which it calls a digital carry-on. The idea is that leading up to your trip, you can create a virtual briefcase of stuff you want to read. You know you’ve run into those 10 page articles in the Atlantic that you want to read but never have time. So Lufthansa lets you compile everything you want to read for your flight and then you can just call it up and start sifting through while onboard.

Sure, you could do this on your own by just saving a bunch of links in an email, but Lufthansa has put this together in a slick package that also lets you share with others and get content recommendations. If you’re on a long flight, it’s a great way to pass the time.

I give Lufthansa a lot of credit for really trying to integrate its wifi offering into everyday life. Now if they would only put powerports in coach. But that’s a whole different issue.

For those who have tried to book a flight on Delta in the last week, you’ve probably noticed that the layout of the booking process has changed. Delta is now showing amenities by flight all in the booking path. That’s a huge improvement and means you don’t have to hunt and peck to figure it out anymore. I still think there are a few more amenity logos that could be added, however.

If you go to book a flight, here’s what you’ll now see:

The top flight is what it looks like before you start clicking and mousing-over. The bottom is all the info that can be displayed. I do like the “More Price Options” on the left side so that you can see whether it’s worth it for a non-refundable or first class fare without re-searching. (Hint: If you really care about price, that will almost never be useful.) It would have been nice had Delta simply said, “for $xxx more, you can fly in biz” instead of making you mouseover, but that’s minor.

The meat of the improvement in my mind, however, is at the top right of the flight where you see amenity icons. If you mouse over them, it explains what they are. In this particular case, it shows that there is wifi and a personal screen at each seat. (If you’re wondering what the little red icon is, that just shows it being a redeye.) From what I can tell, Delta now has 10 icons. (I was told there was an 11th for food, but I haven’t seen it in the wild, so I refuse to believe it. Food does appear at the bottom of the flight info.) Here’s the list of all of them along with a few suggested additions of my own.

This system is a big improvement but it’s not perfect. For example, the icon will only show up when the fleet is completely outfitted with a technology. So while they’re adding wifi to the regional aircraft, it won’t show up. Only when the whole fleet is done will that happen. I suppose it’s better to underpromise here, but it would be nice if they could do more of a real-time display like American does.

It also gets a little confusing on connections. For example, you might see a personal screen and an overhead screen in the amenities area. That’s because the first flight might be on an airplane with a personal screen while the second is on an airplane with an overhead screen. Or you might just see the personal screen icon and realize that the second flight has nothing at all. If you mouse over the icon, it shows you which flight has which. And to be honest, I can’t really think of a better way to do it so I’m probably not in a place to say anything.

The one thing that absolutely needs to be fixed is that amenities aren’t available for codeshare flights. With Delta becoming increasingly close with Air France/KLM, those airlines’ results show up a lot. So to just have blank amenity information for those flights is a big deal, especially if you’re going to Europe where they consider their flights interchangeable. According to Delta, it would like to add codeshare flights but there isn’t a timeline for that yet.

I know it sounds like a lot of complaining here, but this really is a big improvement. And it’s actually going to get better next year. I’m told that Delta will soon have the ability for a customer to search for a flight by amenities. So if you want a personal screen, you can put that in as a requirement for the search. That’s huge, but this is a big step in the right direction as well.

When you think of airlines that are technologically forward-thinking, you probably think of someone like Virgin America. But when it comes to legacy airlines, well, you probably don’t think of anyone. Delta has been doing a lot lately to change that opinion. The airline is really pushing forward on a number of tech projects that really show some initiative over there. It’s great to see a legacy carrier really taking an interest in these things (and spending money on them too).

Of all the legacy carriers, Delta is the only one that has embraced wifi in the sky. Yes, American has it some MD-80s (not all) and on the fleet that flies between New York and the west coast, but that’s about it. And since the first announcement was made years ago, American hasn’t done a thing. As for United, well, it’s only on the airplanes flying between New York and California. That’s it. But Delta, as we all know, has been installing wifi on just about every airplane it can find with more than 50 seats. That’s not a sure thing these days, because my guess is usage still doesn’t justify the expense. But Delta’s looking forward and betting that eventually, it will.

But just because you put wifi on an airplane doesn’t mean that you’re a tech leader. You need more than that. One big thing you need is a way to power all those computers that people want to use up high. Putting power on an airplane can be expensive and with ever-increasing battery life, it may eventually become unnecessary, but for now, it’s an absolute necessity that most airlines (except Virgin America) have been unwilling to address.

Now, don’t get excited. Delta is not putting power on its airplanes, at least not any more than it already has, but it’s working on transforming the gate area to provide power all over the place.

You know you’ve done it. You’ve parked yourself on the floor in some far corner of the gate area because you found the only, dusty, hidden power outlet for miles. If you saw the scene from afar, you’d probably wonder why a gaggle of geeks have gathered. But that’s how most airports are set up. Sure, Samsung has sponsored power towers in certain places and Southwest has invested in seats with power in the gates, but others have failed to acknowledge that it’s important. So now, Delta is taking things into its own hands.

Starting with 19 airports, Delta will be putting power outlets in every gate area. It will put two power stations in each gate area. Each station will have six power outlets and 2 USB ports. Where will they be? These will go in all the hubs as well as Boston, Columbus, Hartford, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Nashville, Norfolk, Omaha, Pittsburgh, Portland, Seattle, and St. Louis. Looking at the motley group of airports here, it makes you wonder if they wanted to do this in all airports but couldn’t get the airport leaders to go along with it for one reason or another. (Yes, airports can be difficult.) But I imagine we’ll see this roll out further as we go.

But Delta is taking this one step further for SkyClub members. In every domestic SkyClub, Delta has installed a recharging pad. There are adapters for a variety of different devices at the desk, and you can just plug in and recharge. There’s room for a ton of devices so there really shouldn’t ever be a shortage. The point is, if you have something that needs to be charged, you can.

If you look at the other ways Delta has tried to integrate technology, whether it’s creating a Facebook application for people to book flights, putting together a Twitter assist team, or putting iPads in gate areas to order food, it’s really starting to create this picture of a legacy airline that’s willing to take chances on newer technology in order to improve the customer experience. I still don’t think the Facebook application is going to do much, but Delta wants to invest in these types of technologies with the realization that they’re going to help people. They may not all be successes in the end, but that’s not a reason to stop trying.

I’m glad to see Delta investing in the customer experience here. Hopefully the new United will do the same. And American? Well, yeah, maybe some day.

Original power strip photo via Flickr user mroach/CC 2.0

For years we’ve heard Southwest talk about how its reservation system was preventing the airline from doing all sorts of things. International flying and codesharing are the big two that have been publicly discussed lately, but there are more things that can’t be done because of its ancient system. Despite these issues having been raised for years and year, we’re still at least three years away from a new system coming online. At Media Day last week, I sat with Bob Jordan, EVP Strategy and Planning at Southwest, to better understand why this was taking so friggin’ long.

But first, how about a little history? Southwest’s reservation system is known as SAAS. This system actually evolved from the old Braniff Cowboy system. Now, Braniff was an airline that had style but absolutely no network planning abilities. After some insane route expansion after deregulation and a whole host of other issues, Braniff collapsed in May 1982. I was four years old at the time. When Braniff died, Southwest ended up carrying the torch on a version of that reservation system, so yes, it’s old and it’s not built to handle an airline in today’s industry.

Bob explained that while it’s problematic today, for the longest time it was perfect for Southwest. Southwest was a simple airline and as the major user of the SAAS system, it could make any changes it wanted as long as it wanted to invest the time and effort. It was effectively a customized reservation system, one that Braniff agents probably wouldn’t recognize today. But as Southwest became more complicated, so did the reservation system. As Bob explained:

As we started to evolve our business model, we really put our first big strategic plan together in ’06. We looked at, well, we need to think about our boarding, think about new products, think about codeshares, think about international, think about having the ability to do complicated fare rules, stays, and all that. . . . You have to sit back and re-evaulate.

And so Southwest did re-evaluate, but it kept coming to the decision to continue modifying this patchwork of a reservation system to make it do what it wanted to do. Despite the fact that there was a mounting problem with being able to handle everything, Southwest stayed the course. But it did have a project together to try to figure out what to do in the future. That project just kept getting delayed.

The other thing that’s happened in the last 3 years specifically, the project has been re-prioritized. Fuel prices spiked, the economy went into the toilet, and so in light of those facts, we interrupted a lot of things and said, we need to pursue reservations but we need to stop and build some things that will add revenue production now, like Business Select, like EarlyBird check-in, and a bunch of revenue management things under the covers that are being pursued that are generating a lot of money.

So the reservation system problem continued to fester. They continued to modify SAAS to be able to handle more of these revenue projects, but the system just couldn’t handle everything. Yet the project to really address this issue kept being pushed back until this year. Though I thought there was a decision to get a new system long ago, Bob says that’s not the case.

The question became whether to continue to build on SAAS versus whether it would be available on Sabre, on Amadeus. That discussion started early this year and we came to a decision early summer that the right thing to do was move instead of continuing to build. Then it became, move where?

Having finally made the inevitable decision to move to a new system, now Southwest had to pick which one. And that still hasn’t happened. After the AirTran acquisition was announced, Southwest said it had narrowed the finalists to two vendors, and I can’t imagine AirTran’s vendor is one of those. AirTran uses Navitaire’s New Skies system. That system has more capabilities than the previous Open Skies system, but it is still limited. That’s why we’ve seen airlines like JetBlue leave Navitaire for others, Sabre in JetBlue’s case. They need more complexity, and Southwest needs that now too.

But what’s the timing now? It’s going to be a long time. Now that Southwest has to integrate AirTran, this might delay the new system even longer so that they can work to integrate AirTran first. And then there’s the problem of AirTran’s existing international business. How will they handle that in the meantime?

We’re working on that. We’ve got timing options. International works on Navitaire and we could pursue an option that basically continues to use Navitaire for international but connects SAAS to that, or we could pursue an option where we move the international business first to the new platform.

In other words, it could be a mess for awhile. But once the decision on the vendor is made, hopefully soon, and the project is ready to commence, we still have a long way to go.

It’s probably an 18 to 24 month project once you start, probably 24 month range. We’ve got probably up to a year’s worth of work to complete our requirements gathering and planning before we begin to execute so it’s in the 36 month timeframe.

What we now see at Southwest is an airline that will continue to be hamstrung by its reservation system for years to come. Had it made the decision to switch earlier or kept the project at a high priority, then I’m sure this would be much further along, but now Southwest has to live with electronic handcuffs for a lot longer. And that can’t be good for the business, but, well, they set the priority so they apparently feel comfortable with this timeframe.

Photo via Flickr user ajmexico/CC 2.0[]