Mobile: A Round Trip to Tomorrow. Part 2 | Hitit

Perception is everything

While we are waiting for the Digital ID token (please see Part 1) to become a reality, I was thinking, what do we already have that can be used to improve some aspects of our travel experience? Having a background in marketing, sometimes I feel like while looking for solutions for industry challenges, we often forget about psychological factors and creativity, prioritizing instead technology and engineering.

For example, the industries' biggest pain is the disruption when there is a delay. An airline loses on average 30-70 USD per minute, and a passenger’s frustration goes up. If psychology and creativity cannot solve ‘’the plane on the ground’’ part of the disruption equation, they do have the power to influence a customer’s satisfaction level.

Keep passengers informed

Let me give you a quick example of a great psychological idea. An improvement of passenger satisfaction on the London underground came when they didn’t add any extra trains or changed their frequency, but when they introduced countdown displays on the platforms. The nature of the wait is not only dependent on its duration, but on the level of uncertainty. Waiting 7 min for a train with a countdown on a clock is proven to be less frustrating and irritating, than waiting 4 minutes wondering when this train is going to arrive.

The tip that can be learned from this example is – keep the passenger informed –time, a cause of the delay. A cold announcement in a noisy airport cannot do it, it is better to use a passenger’s mobile phone. With the simple and available to everyone Push notification technology, you can send the passenger updates. And, it is even better if the messages are personalized and, in the travellers' native language. Research is on our side too as 79% of travellers consider trip related notifications useful and would like to receive them.

Perspective change

Another example from the rail industry was beautifully put by Mr. Rory Sutherland: in early 2010 the Eurostar train spent £6 million to reduce the time between London and Paris by 40 min, and the results were not very satisfying. With the fraction of this money, they could have implemented wi-fi on the train. It wouldn’t have reduced the duration of the journey but would have improved the enjoyment. With 10 percent of the money, they could have hired top male and female models to serve the campaign and people would have asked for the ride to last longer.

So, why can’t an airline app be an entertainment tool?

Right now, people boarding a plane already expect films, audiobooks, and some radio, that’s the norm, that’s a given. A plane is like an elevator, there is not the space for a 15 cm display that’s around 40 cm away from your face. And, for most travellers, that’s all the entertainment. So, what else can be offered, that’s not just a gimmick, but really makes the experience of 45 minutes or 4 and a half hours better, for both the customer and airline? Is there a way to put a CRM program hidden under some entertainment system or personalize the customers experience somehow? Or, let’s say a customer is not able to finish watching a movie before the plane lands, will he/she be able to continue watching?

For a standard entertainment system, an airline must carry almost 3 kg of extra weight per seat. The passenger’s mobile device already comes along with the passenger.

The integration of an airline app with a common VOD platform like Netflix, Hulu or HBO can solve the personalization problem. The sky is the limit for an airline to monetize a collaboration like this. First, an airline will save on fuel costs and system maintenance. Secondly, revenue can come from the ancillary sales- high-quality wi-fi, or pre-downloaded movies, which can we watched any time, even after the plane lands.

What do games and airlines have in common?

Today the Air Travel industry is embracing mobile as a primary sales channel, but do they do it based on capacity? I’m sure everyone knows Pokémon go game? After it was released it took less than a day for it to start making money, and more money than all the other apps in both Apple and Google’s Appstore’s. Also, users didn’t even have to pay a cent for the game, all the money was coming from optional purchases that people were making as they played. In the game industry, this is called Fremium. They do it by applying some fundamental behavioural psychology lessons, which have been well-known for decades – that is, people find it easier to spend money when they are using a card, than when they are paying with cash.

So, the first thing these games do is to make you set up a virtual currency, so it does not feel like you are spending real currency, even though you are. Then they add another layer- let’s say you pay for a candy booster with gold stars, for which you paid with your credit card, this is already quite removed. Today’s technology takes us even further, as we have eliminated the extra step of sending your brain the signal that you are about to make payment. Games, e-commerce stores, airline apps, they already store your payment information. So, it’s not even a click that separates you from purchase, it’s verification.

Airlines have had this virtual currency in their hands for 30 years. The most common thing we see is buying a reward ticket, extra service, and occasionally a good sale. I believe there is a huge opportunity for creativity here.

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