Chicken Scratches » non-software

What’s Wrong with Flying: How the internet killed travel

Eddie Sullivan — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 17:21:04 +0000

Air travel is in a downward spiral. Not literally of course, but clearly and consistently, and everybody knows it. The airlines know it, the airline employees know it, travel agents found out a while ago, and consumers sure as Hell know it. There are a lot of reasons for it, but this post talks about just one: Expedia.com.

Airlines claim the degradation in quality comes from increased competition. They say they are forced to cut corners and reduce features in order to stay competitive. Does this make sense?

What about other industries?

Well, if it did make sense, we might expect to see a similar pattern in other industries. There is certainly vigorous competition in the auto industry. Car companies struggle to meet their profit margins. And yet, over the last twenty years, cars have gotten more reliable, full of more features, and more fuel-efficient, when you compare similar models. Competition has hurt the auto workers and the bottom lines of the auto companies, but it has made the product itself better for the consumer.

Why has this not happened in the airline industry? Cars and flights are clearly two very different products, but what is the difference that accounts for this discrepancy? The main factor, I believe, is the way people make their purchases. When buying a car, a potential purchaser reads all the specs, he goes to the dealership and test-drives the car and kicks the tires. When the same person buys an airline ticket, he types the itinerary into Expedia.com (or Travelocity, or Orbitz) and gets a list of flights, ordered by price. He picks the cheapest ticket and steels himself for a miserable experience.

"Well," contend the airlines, "people only care about the price of a flight, so we sacrifice the customer experience to meet the demand for lower prices." They now even resort to secret fees for checked bags, in-flight meals, even headphones to watch the movie. This is a sneaky trick to manipulate the search engines. Those extra fees do not show up in the results page. I challenge the assertion that consumers only care about price to the exclusion of other factors. I think the real problem is that price is the only piece of information they are given.

The proof of the pudding

Try it. Go to expedia.com. Fill out the query form. Notice there is no field for the number of checked bags, there is no field for whether you will be having a meal, there is no field for whether you will want to watch the movie. These are important factors that you would want to take into account, but you are not given the opportunity.

Now submit your search. You're presented with a list of flights, with the price in big black numbers and the flight schedule. That's it. No information about leg room, customer satisfaction, on-time performance, in-flight food and entertainment options, cancellation policies, or baggage handling. If you had this information, you would take it into account, but since you don't, you have no choice but to base your decision on price alone.

When I go to Amazon.com to buy a fifteen dollar book, I can read four pages of user reviews telling me about the book. When buying a 600 dollar cross-country flight, I don't see a single user review. There is nowhere for me to enter a review if I want to. The technology is here. It's everywhere. Everywhere except the airline search engines. Why?

Why?

Maybe the airlines are scared to let the consumers have a voice. Maybe they don't want user reviews, because the reviews would be overwhelmingly negative. If so, they are wrong. They're not wrong about the tone of the reviews; they would certainly be mostly negative, at least at first. They are wrong about the effect the reviews would have. In the long run, providing a way for consumers to compare flights and airlines based on more than just price will make flying a more pleasant experience for all. It will allow airlines to compete based on quality, not just price. And it's smart business.

Expedia, Travelocity, and Orbitz are not going to change. They are the Big Three of flight searches. They are cleaning up while the airlines are suffering. There is not enough competition. The only way we will see an improvement is if somebody else steps in and offers us an alternative way to shop for flights. Google, are you listening? Amazon? Apple? Give us more information. Please.

This month’s Limerick contest: Basketball

Eddie Sullivan — Mon, 12 May 2008 21:28:18 +0000

This month's contest over at limericks.chickenwingsoftware.com is Basketball: In this, the NBA playoff season, young man's fancy turns lightly to thoughts of hoops. Plus, the Celtics wear green!

A typical entry:

There once was a girl named Christine
Who had gotten the gambling gene
She said with some sadness,
"I lost at March Madness
Before it reached the sweet sixteen."

Sure, it's no masterpiece, but it's fun. That's sort of the spirit of these contests. Head on over to read more, rate them, or write your own.

Let the Limericks Flow

Eddie Sullivan — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 19:58:39 +0000

We've created an online contest
To see who can rhyme the bestest
So come to our site
And prove you can write
The limerick that rates the highest.

Sorry, that's what happens when you try to write a limerick after four hours of reading technical specification documents. If you think you can do better, come to our limerick contest website and make an entry, read and rate other entries, and waste some time.

For the developers, the contest site is hosted on Django with a MySQL backend.

There will be a new category of limerick writing contest every month. This month's theme is cheese. Enjoy!

Go to the limerick contest.

What’s wrong with hotels

Eddie Sullivan — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 14:20:00 +0000

Anybody who needs to stay in hotels often knows there are certain areas where they could all do better. I tend to look at everything with an eye towards what could be improved. Here are some random thoughts on how hotels could be better. Some of these ideas are a bit far-fetched, but hey, that's why I'm writing a weblog, not a manifesto.

More pricing logic

It sometimes seems like the cheaper a hotel is, the more services it provides. I've stayed in a broad range of hotels, from top of the line luxury suites to eight-cot-to-a-room hostels. Strangely, there are some areas where the lesser quality hotels actually do better. Why is it that when I pay $40 per night for a small family-run inn, there is personalized service and free wi-fi in every room, but in a hotel that charges $375 per night there is either no wi-fi available or it costs $20 extra? What are we actually getting for the higher price? Why do cheap hotels provide breakfast but expensive hotels don't? It's backwards.

Cleanliness

After seeing watching a news report about hotel cleanliness issues, I've been a little bit paranoid about sanitation in hotels. A couple idea:

Get rid of the carpet

Carpeted floors are notoriously hard to clean. I don't want to think about what kind of dirtiness people can leave on carpets that doesn't get picked up by a vacuum cleaner. Get rid of the carpeted floor. Replace it with hardwoods, or if that's too expensive, a synthetic material designed to not be too cold on our toes.

Auto-magically clean

Have you seen those coin-operated public restrooms in public cities that actually clean themselves after each use? Why can't we refine this technology and use it for hotel bathrooms? When the maid comes in, he or she removes all the towels and paper products, closes the bathroom door, and presses a button. Instantly, the whole bathroom is sprayed with disinfecting detergent from a nozzle in the ceiling, rinsed, then dried with high-speed air jets. Put the bed on hydraulic lifts to make it easy to clean underneath. Instead of just layering a blanket on top of a sheet, use a large pillow-case-like wrapper for the whole blanket. Design the quilt with drawstrings to make changing the blanket case easy. There is nothing worse than tossing around at night and waking to realize the sheet has slid off the bed and you're now face-to-face with someone else's potential filth.

Conveniences

This should be obvious, but: free wi-fi. For everyone. Everywhere. Provide an easy to use central control panel for things like the alarm clock, the thermostat, maybe even ordering room-service. Every hotel alarm clock has a different interface, leaving guests with no confidence they will actually wake up on time. Digital thermostats for the showers. It takes me forever to get the temperature just right in an unfamiliar shower. I want to be able to just turn a dial or press a button for the exact temperature I need and let the electronics do the rest.

And more

The more I think, the more ideas I come up with. I know most of these will never happen, but it can't hurt to dream, can it? Feel free to add any ideas using the comment link below.