..as we near the end of development and head towards launch of the Offer Me aTrip pilot.

When we began development of Offer Me aTrip, we wrote a number of challenges on the board, each of which had to be solved to make our new approach to on-line travel viable.

Here’s a list of those challenges, together with our approach to solving them together with a few preview images from the development shop:

1. Offer Holiday Solutions, not Just Components

You can find deals for all things travel on the web, but putting together a complete holiday takes time: holidays are complex products with many different options and configurations.

Therefore we’ve tailored Offer Me aTrip for each type of holiday, ensuring that we ask customers the right questions to fully understand their travel needs.

Since a Travel Agent would ask a cruise holiday customer and a ski holiday customer a completely different set of question, so does Offer Me aTrip..

2. Use the internet to improve the travel buying communication process

Whilst the web has transformed communication, challenges often remain when two people are not face to face.

However..

By building some intelligence into the process  we believe we can get the fastest and most concise set of holiday wishes possible, with maximum convenience and minimum time spent.

Of course, getting this right involves lots of ‘play-testing’ to ensure that we ask not just the questions that the designer thinks we should ask, but also the questions that the customer wants to answer – with the information that the agent needs. That’s what we are doing right now!

3. Make Offer Me aTrip a joy for agents

Putting together the perfect holiday package and explaining why it is perfect for a given customer can be time consuming.

That’s why we’ve been putting effort into the agent process, ensuring that packages can be described quickly, colourfully and efficiently, saving agent time and maximising customer satisfaction.

Ensuring maximum re-use of information, providing tools to automagically find relevant images and trying to make the agent’s life easier is our goal.

4. Make something special and unique for customers

We wanted to provide something reminiscent of the good old days when people enjoyed selecting holidays (before the process required several days of on-line searches).

Offer Me aTrip presents holiday offers to customers as a tailor made web-brochure which can be emailed, printed and shared on-line to help enrichen the holiday decision process.

Final Thoughts

Obviously such goals are easier stated than fulfilled, although it is our aim to get as close as possible on the first attempt, and to keep working towards meeting and exceeding them.

Admittedly that first try is taking just a little longer than originally expected, but bear with us – we’ll have it out of the door soon! Expect to hear from us with a launch close to the end of January.

And then we’ll start posting our plans for version 2 soon after!

Now that the New Year is firmly upon us we owe the world a quick update on our launch progress..

As of now, the development of Offer Me aTrip is pretty much wrapped up and complete. Although we can’t wait to unleash it on the world, we are still working on a number of ‘fit & finish’ items so that we can ensure the best user experience possible.

User experience is important to us, which is the reason why we would rather launch when ready instead of rushing to market. We’ll let you know as soon as we are ready, which should be within the next 1-2 weeks.

Meanwhile, back to work…

Some early preview images: (more coming soon)

If you can’t do it right, just stay away.

UPDATE: I’ve now had a response from Heathrow. See the bottom of this post for details.

On Wednesday I got up at an unholy hour to catch the first flight back to London, keen to capitalise on a full working day. After a few weather related wobbles I landed at Heathrow in good time.

I needn’t have bothered.

My early start was gradually eroded as I waited, and waited and waited for my baggage to arrive, my mood slowly worsened by the stench from the nearby toilets and the awareness that, having waited for close to two hours for my bag in the same spot in late December, I could be in for a very long wait.

I turned to Twitter to vent my frustration:

And then something wonderful happened. They actually tweeted me back:

Imagine my surprise. Well done Heathrow! They care! They listen to customers! They actually realise that it is 2010.

Or do they?

Naively I followed the link and laid out my issues as politely as possible, in the belief that this would help management understand customer issues and prioritise improvements. I was eagerly looking forward to the ‘we’ll be in touch’ part, fully expecting that they would allay all of my fears about the nation’s flagship airport being in such incapable hands.

Dear Heathrow,

I’m writing with feedback for you following your reply to my tweet of this morning (@marklad2020).

On 23rd December after flying from Zürich to Heathrow I waited for close to 2 hours for my bag to be delivered to the baggage belt.

This morning, repeating the same journey my bag was delivered 1.5 hours after disembarking from the aircraft. No explanation was given. 

At the same time, whilst standing at belt number 2 there was a noticeable smell of excrement coming from the nearby toilets.

I am obviously not the only person to comment on the shoddy state of the terminal and the poor message and welcome that it provides to visitors to Britain.

I’d be grateful for your feedback on this matter.

Regards,
Mark Seall.

 

And…

After a looong wait – just over 24 hours – nothing.

I sent a gentle reminder:

48 hours after the event, still silence.

Had Heathrow or whichever lame social media consulting company they’ve hired just ignored my comment then I would by now have calmed down and forgotten about it. However, by raising my expectations and letting me waste time giving feedback they’ve re-opened the wound, and then allowed it to fester.

I now not only think their service sucks, I think their management and PR are incompetent (ok, we all probably knew that anyway).

Unreasonable expectations?

Ask yourself this: In 2008, BAA spent £17 million on marketing and communications. (later figures are not available). How much of that effort makes a real difference to their customer perception and brand?

Now, how much goodwill and how many potential customers are they losing by making such a hash of social media and failing in the eyes of customers who today have the power to spread their message far and wide across the Internet?

Never before have companies had the power to influence customer perception so directly. It is a shame that so many are wasting the opportunity.

UPDATE

A few hours after this post went live, and following several Tweets from other users on Twitter I received a very professional and reasonable response:

Dear Mr Seall,
Thank you for your tweets and email regarding your recent journeys through Heathrow. I apologise for the delay in responding to you.

I know it certainly is frustrating to have to wait so long for your luggage following a flight and I am sorry this has happened to you following flights to Heathrow on more than one occasion.

The delivery of baggage to passengers after a flight is the responsibility of each airline. While airlines transfer your bags from the aircraft and deliver them onto the baggage reclaim belts for collection, we at Heathrow are responsible for ensuring the baggage belts are maintained and remain in operation.

As you will know, on both of the days you travelled, bad weather in the UK and elsewhere caused disruption and some airlines experienced delays and cancellations. I have forwarded the details of your experience to our colleagues at Swiss Air Lines and I trust they also will be in touch soon.

Regardless of the above, I do understand that these journeys were made far worse by the lack of information provided to you and other passengers waiting such a long time in the reclaim hall.

We know we have more to do to improve the passenger experience at Heathrow. Our communications team are currently working on a project to improve the communication between airlines and passengers at baggage reclaim halls when there are delays. We are working with our operational teams to bring a range of initiatives online shortly.

I also note your comments regarding the smell in the baggage reclaim hall and I have today passed this on to our facilities manager at Terminal 1. I agree this certainly is not a great welcome for visitors and I know our facilities manager will appreciate knowing of your experience.

Once again I am sorry this happened. I trust our airline colleagues will be in touch and I certainly hope we can regain your confidence on future visits to our airport.
Yours sincerely,

[name removed]
Passenger Communications
BAA Heathrow

Fair enough. I don’t think the weather is an excuse – I’ve frequently flown from airports far worse affected by weather.

But fair enough.

The root of the problem is probably best summed up in the sentence “Our communications team are currently working on a project to improve the communication between airlines and passengers at baggage reclaim halls when there are delays.” – Some companies just communicate effectively as a part of their DNA. If you need a ‘project’ to look at how you communicate basic information then perhaps something is wrong?

After this post, we promise not to mention Heathrow Airport on this blog ever again. – expect a new and sunny post sometime soon about our very imminent launch!

A £150 in potential revenue, or a delighted customer

Flying home the other day, I managed to arrive at the airport 4 hours early due to some overly conservative traffic planning. Knowing there were two flights with the same airline departing prior to my flight I asked at the desk if there was any space on an earlier plane.

Yes, space was available and £150 would make my non-flexible ticket a little more flexible.

However, I decided instead to treat myself to a good meal and settle down somewhere with my laptop before arriving home just before midnight feeling tired, and as usual less than enamoured with the airline.

Revenue vs Customer Delight

The airline have obviously calculated that taking £150 from me now is a safer bet than their chances of selling the available seat with the extra four hours I’d allowed them by flying early. Further, perhaps the inconvenience suffered might persuade me to buy a more expensive ticket next time.

This is a reasonable bet, albeit a defensive strategy designed to maximise cash return instead of customer delight.

I left the counter feeling that the airline had been fair, but not overly helpful. To the question “How was your flight” my answer would be “Ok”, or “Terrible” in the case of additional delays, grumpy staff, irritating fellow passengers and other realities of flying.

Alternatively the airline had an opportunity for me to leave the counter with the feeling that they had been helpful, that they had my interests and comfort at heart, arriving home 4 hours early, less tired and extolling their virtues. “How was your flight?” “Excellent, they let me on the early flight and I was home early.”

Ok, an extra £150 is cash in the bank and I’m just a single customer.

But multiply this scenario over thousands of customers over many years. Given the choice, you’ll choose the airline you trust to make your journey easier. You’ll even pay a little more because you like them, and because you don’t feel like they take every opportunity to extract more of your money. When the airline is mentioned over dinner people will relate positively and not negatively. People will not try to avoid you.

The airline develops brand power, a power that can often be measured in billions of pounds and mark the difference between a firm in decline and a firm with prospects. The difference between the airline of choice and the airline of no choice. The difference between profit and loss.

Undoubtedly the airline have calculated all of this as well. However, looking at the industry I would argue that a number of airlines have gotten their sums badly wrong..

Photo courtesy of diamond geezer via Flickr under a Creative Commons Licence

How does website design reflect customer priorities?

[tweetmeme]On Saturday I drove from Zürich to a small village in the Swiss countryside, about 50 minutes away. The temperature was about –10 degrees, and it was snowing steadily with a thin covering of white stuff on the motorway. After a pleasant dinner I dusted about 2cm of snow off the car and drove home again, with many other motorists and without drama or incident.

The next morning the temperature was –15 degrees and I drove the same car (not a 4×4) up and down a mountain. Apart from the view there was little to write home about.At the same time the trains have been punctual and planes have been taking off as normal.

Tomorrow I will fly to London Heathrow and, it seems, that despite slightly milder weather the planes, trains and automobiles are having difficulty in keeping things together. This is an oft commented phenomena, but it leads my to an example of web design that hints at a common corporate problem which does no favours to companies, or their consumers, and particularly to travellers in this case.

Three questions for consideration

Have a look at the this screenshot from Heathrow Airport’s website this morning

1. Does the website answer the exam question “Can I get home or away?”  What does “some disruption” mean? Delays, cancelations, inconvenience? What exactly?

2. What is the communication priority of this website considering the placement and design of the different messages? Shopping, or information for customers?

3. Does this website reflect a company that is focused on getting people from A to B as effectively as possible, or a company that wants to screw as many £ as possible out of a captive audience?

Am I being too harsh and reading too much in to things? Or is this a fair reflection of that fact that many corporations focus on priorities that suit them instead of the customer, don’t understand customer service, and don’t understand how to deliver it via the web?

Update

Following my journey, here is my latest Twitter post:

Time required to fly from Zürich to UK: 1hr10min. Time for luggage to be delivered to baggage hall: 1hr45mins. Heathrow is a national disgrace.

Seriously. And excuses about Christmas peaks and weather don’t wash since they have shown so many times previously that they can also screw it up on a good day..

Offer Me a Trip – great travel offers, powered by amazing humans

On Monday we began searching for Travel Agents to power Offer Me a Trip. As in any new endeavour we were partly anxious about the potential response.

Had our market research been correct in identifying  a demand for the service? Had we interpreted the market’s needs in the correct way? Had we done a good enough job in communicating our offer and our advantages?

Happily for us quite a few travel agents have proven the answers to those questions to be YES, and we are well the way towards our target quota of agents for the pilot launch in January.

We’ve also been hugely encouraged by the positive comments received in the process, and we absolutely can’t wait to launch so that we can repay you all by providing some customers for your services. We are sure they will be delighted with what you can offer.

So we just wanted to say a big

Thanks!

We are planning to launch our live pilot phase in January, and we’re looking for Travel Agents to participate.

(Wondering what Offer Me aTrip is? Read our introduction)

Many websites launch with a huge bang, and quickly fade to a whimper. The search engine Cuil was one such example of a heavily hyped launch that quickly faded. Why? because it didn’t doesn’t work properly.

Although our excitement is barely containable we are resisting the temptation to shout too loudly just yet and will begin with a pilot launch of Offer Me aTrip in January.

What is a Pilot Launch

Its a different word for beta, and we are hoping that unlike “beta” pilot doesn’t suggest that it’s half finished and that things won’t work.

What we do know is that despite our very best attention, hours of testing and reams of feedback, when real life customers and agents start using Offer Me aTrip in anger they will find things that they don’t like, things that don’t work quite as expected and probably a few things seem just plain odd. We are going to be surprised by quite a few things too, but hopefully not all negative.

We’ll start by advertising on-line, sending traffic to the site and listening carefully for feedback. Depending on what we find we’ll hold off on advertising for a day or so while we make changes and repeat the process with a higher volume of traffic. The only thing we know for certain about this process is that customers and agents will be relentlessly chased for feedback and there will be the odd feeling of devastation as what we thought were really cool features turn out to be complete rubbish.

Hopefully, several weeks of this process will result in a well honed site, ready for the big launch. Standby for more information in due course.

Want to be a part of it?

If you are a Travel Agent and would like to participate in our pilot and make the world a better place then check us out and sign up at OfferMeaTrip.com/agent

the familiar topic of Online Travel Booking Frustration is discussed in a post on Travel Rants Today

This topic always makes our ears prick up since it is one of the main drivers for Offer Me aTrip’s formation.

Companies make enormous investments in marketing, PR and brand building. They do this because they want us to like them, they want us to buy their product, and after that they want us to come back and buy again.

Sadly, and all too often, this investment rapidly comes to naught as customers hit a brick wall half way through an on-line purchase, or as they struggle with impenetrable functionality, or grapple with some other confounding corporate behaviour. We’ve all scratched our heads far too frequently as we try to decipher an error message, wonder why a drop-down box is blank, end up in the same place that we started, or try to comprehend some strange on-line corporate policy.

It must be run by morons

Apart from physically inhibiting sales and negating all that expensive marketing, poor on-line design can leave customer with the impression that the company doesn’t care and lead them to the conclusion that it must be run by morons. Which says nothing for the product.

Having frequently been frustrated by poor on-line experiences, ensuring that Offer Me aTrip provides a simple, effective, enjoyable and hassle free user experiences has been our core aim since starting the project.  In truth we’ve spent rather too much time so far in obsessing over this – but we think it is time well spent. We also think it is time we will continue to spend and a goal we will continue to chase.

With that in mind, we much enjoyed a blog post by Dustin Curtis, calling out American Airlines in an open letter for their “horrific” on-line experience.

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 some questions and two suggestions for you.

Dustin’s post is a great read – highly recommended. But it gets better. A ‘user experience’ architect from American wrote a fascinatingly candid email under the pseudonym of Mr X, providing an all too familiar insight into the organisational and managerial issues which lead to such experiences (I say familiar, because anybody who has worked in a large organisation will have some similar experience).

So obviously the story ends happily with American Airlines using the experience to learn and improve, making huge amounts of profit in the process.

Um, no. Mr X was promptly fired. 

Never mind

In a new post, Mr X talks of an example where a firm deliberately tries to obfuscate the customer for financial gain, undermining an expensive branding effort. I recall a similar experience with a telecoms firm whilst discussing implementation of a contract cancellation policy. It started well enough: we should let customers cancel contracts early in certain circumstances where it would have been unreasonable for us to insist on completing the duration. But it ended badly: we should not make this process easy or obvious.

My view was, and still is, that alienating a customer for the sake of a hundred pounds makes poor business sense looking at how much is spent on acquiring customers in the first place (usually much much more).

It is amazing how many companies just can’t get past the simple equation: good will spend – bad will stupidity = profit. In the meantime, this is a great opportunity for us and we look forwards to watching our customers judge us on it.

Warning: this post could be considered to be tedious, but I just wanted to say it.

I recently saw an article in Travel Weekly entitled “Golden age of air travel has ended”. Of course it has – air travel is, quite simply, a pain.

Here are the instructions for flying on an airplane.

1. Travel to airport

Not trivial, and worthy of an entire blog post on its own.

2. QUEUE for Check-in

A few years ago savvy travellers could get around this by checking in on-line. However as most people are now on to this, at most airports on-line check-in just means swapping the very long queue for a slightly less long queue.

3. QUEUE for passport control

Varies by airport. Either have a disinterested official glance nonchalantly at your passport, or wait while an even less interested official processes a set of completely worthless forms in an overly officious manner.

4. QUEUE for security

Worth doing when security is taken seriously, but frustrating because a) the person in front will get this simple procedure completely wrong, b) many security staff reinvent the rules differently each time and c) too often the process is done so badly that there seems little point (examples on request).

(Note: If by now you are wondering about the point of this post, it is about the fact that many of the queues could be avoided with a little thought)

5. Queue to board

After another passport check and some early queue positioning to avoid ‘overhead luggage anxiety you may finally board the plane.

6. Queue to sit

People invariably don’t get or don’t respect the concept of boarding the rows at the back of the aircraft first to avoid aisle congestion, hence another queue once onboard.

7. Queue to get off plane

Unavoidable, unfortunately. Although I frequently think it would be nice to test the emergency evacuation procedure while being hit around the head as people remove their bags from the overhead lockers.

8. Queue for immigration

See item #3

9. Wait around for luggage

Experience varies by airport.

10. Navigate arrivals hall

Congratulations, you’ve arrived.

Am I being unduly negative? Yes. Mostly as a result of having been through this process too many times. However, I can’t help feeling that the air travel process has evolved to be much less efficient than it could be.

For example, recently at Zürich airport I underwent five separate passport checks – at the baggage drop, at the boarding pass check, at the Schengen border control, immediately before the gate and once again immediately before boarding.

One of the excuses for this is that airlines are fined if they deliver people to countries without valid visas, hence an additional check before the gate. However, nobody can explain why a little cooperation between exit border controls and airlines can’t eliminate that extra check and save a few salaries.

I could go on..

Certainly with a little creative thinking many of the steps in this process could be improved, as could many other aspects of travel. The problem is that we sometimes believe that we are still in a ‘golden age’ rather than the modern age where we just need to get around more easily. Hence we remain conditioned to the slow and painful process which involves taking longer to travel through 500 meters at an airport than it does to fly 500 miles on a plane.

Images courtesy of Dheuts and Cedntralasian via Flickr under a Creative Commons Licence.

And why we think it’s important

In a world where the Internet is constantly innovating in order to automate the transfer and availability of knowledge, why are we investing in developing a web-site which requires human beings to deliver travel offers to customers? Isn’t the idea of Offer Me a Trip which relies on traditional Travel Agents somewhat incompatible with the Facebook age?

We don’t think so. Simply because, for the time being at leas,t human results will always be better.

Amazing as the web has become – possibilities such as scanning dozens of flight offers, reading the views of other travellers, getting direct recommendations on activities, meeting travellers with similar interests and many others were previously unimaginable – all this information in all its richness still needs triangulation and processing to place it into a useful context for each individual traveller.

Until either artificial intelligence takes a significant leap forwards, or individuals become willing to spend vast and increasing amounts of their time on travel research (although we recognise that many are and that Offer Me aTrip won’t be for them) then the human element in the form of a Travel Agent’s expertise will remain the fastest and most accurate way to determine the best way to make one of the biggest financial and time investments of a typical consumer’s year.

Web 1.0 was all about connecting information. Web 2.0 is about connecting people. Offer Me aTrip is about connecting consumers with human experts who provide value – a value in the form of Travel Agent expertise which has been somewhat overlooked in the rush to put travel online. That’s why we think the human element is important, and we can’t wait to put it back!

Image courtesy of victoriapeckham via flickr under a creative commons licence.