An American Airlines customer experience

My aviation website pick of the week from Episode 49 of the Airplane Geeks podcast:

My pick is the blog of Dustin Curtis, a user interface designer. Specifically, Article 8 (Dear American Airlines) and Article 9 (Dear Dustin Curtis), which you can find in his blog index. Dustin Curtis wrote to American Airlines:

"I’m a user interface designer. I travel sometimes. Recently, I had the horrific displeasure of booking a flight on your website, aa.com. The experience was so bad that I vowed never to fly your airline again. But before we part ways, I have a couple questions and three suggestions for you."

His 3 suggestions?

1. Treat this as a serious emergency across your entire company.
   
2. Fire your entire design team, if you have one.
   
3. Follow the lead of new, young, and innovative airlines like JetBlue and Virgin America. They know how to harness repeat business through excellent customer experience.
   

Curtis then went ahead and actually created a proposed redesign of the AA site. But then, 

"A user experience architect who works on AA.com sent me a response to my letter. He titled it ' You’re right. You’re so very right. And yet...'”

The response gives some really good insight into the process that large corporations use when creating something so seemingly simple as a web page. It turns out there are some 200 people who together determine just what you see at AA.com!

"The group running AA.com consists of at least 200 people spread out amongst many different groups, including, for example, QA, product planning, business analysis, code development, site operations, project planning, and user experience. We have a lot of people touching the site, and a lot more with their own vested interests in how the site presents its content and functionality. Fortunately, much of the public-facing functionality is funneled through UX, so any new features you see on the site should have been vetted through and designed by us before going public."

It all makes for very interesting reading and provides insights into why it is difficult for some companies to be responsive to customer needs at anything faster than glacial speed.

AirTran Airways to offer Wi-Fi on every flight!

Well, someone had to do it and it looks like it's going to be AirTran Airways. They announced May 12, 2009 that they will be the first major airline to offer passengers wireless broadband Internet access on every flight.

AirTran Airways is partnering with Aircell, the leader in airborne communications for business and commercial aviation, to offer passengers full inflight Internet service across its entire fleet of Boeing 737 and 717 aircraft. All 136 AirTran Airways jets will be fully outfitted with Gogo® Inflight Internet service by mid-summer.

This is a big deal.  In my opinion, the ultimate form of inflight entertainment is where you are in control of the content. What better way to take control of your content than to base it around what you can do with the Internet.

So, what are the boundaries of the AirTran offfering?  According to the airline, "passengers will have full Internet access including: Web, e-mail, instant messaging and access to corporate e-mail and network systems (virtual private networks) – through their Wi-Fi enabled laptops, smartphones and personal digital assistants (PDAs)."

Sounds pretty good, right?  There must be a catch?  Well, there is a fee but I wouldn't call that a catch.  The GoGo service will be available "for a small fee" based on flight length.  That seems reasonable as long as the fee is not exorbitant. I guess the market will define what that level is.

GoGo is the Aircell product that turns the aircraft into a Wi-Fi hotspot, just exactly what I want to see to take control of my own inflight entertainment. Oh, and do a bit of business work too.

Nice job AirTran!

Tweepitition launched for aviation geeks

Airline branding expert, author of the outstanding Simpliflying blog, and previous Airplane Geeks Podcast guest Shashank Nigam has created an interesting little contest. Winners receive autographed copies of the book on Singapore Airlines, “Flying High in a Competitive Industry: Secrets of the World’s Leading Airline” and there is also an a 4GB Apple iPod shuffle to be had.

There are two ways to enter the drawing: You can follow @simpliflying on Twitter and tweet quotes from articles published on SimpliFlying, or you can subscribe to SimpliFlying updates and leave a comment on an article published from now till May 15, 2009.

Shashank produces interesting content, so it's worth following his activities anyway. Find more contest information at Announcing, SimpliFlying’s first Tweepitition!

Air travel and swine flu

With the threat of Influenza A(H1N1) or "swine flu," many travel regulations are being introduced across the world that air travelers need to be aware of. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) provides some useful information through their Travel Center web page.

In their Latest Travel Document News, IATA notes:

Travel regulations introduced by Japan, Singapore, Argentina, Belize, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, France, Italy, Japan, Panama, Spain, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Armenia, Montenegro & Syria.

They provide links by country for more information, and in addition IATA has made available a Frequently asked questions – Influenza A(H1N1) and Air Travel page that relates World Health Organization guidelines for air travelers.