What's wrong with this picture?

Check out this bathroom sink. The countertop was waist-high, and the protruding scallop thing in front of the sink made it impossible to brush my teeth without standing on tippy-toes or climbing up on the counter. OK, I’m on the short side, but I’m still well within the normal range. Obviously I should have paid more attention to those watermelon seed-spitting contests at camp. This wacky design is part of an otherwise very nice new Holiday Inn Express in Davenport, Fla., which has comfortable and spacious rooms and a very helpful staff.

Meanwhile, if I have to attend another conference in a hotel that cranks up the AC to the point where you need a blanket, I’m going to start lugging a space heater around. Earth to Omni Championsgate: It’s November in Florida. The weather is mild. I don't want to have to put a coat on when I go indoors.

The TSA learns about the Constitution

Somebody at the Transportation Security Administration read the U.S. Constitution and found Amendment IV: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
The TSA issued a new directive: “Screening may not be conducted to detect evidence of crimes unrelated to transportation security.” Then it reminded screeners that “traveling with large amounts of currency is not illegal.”
The TSA’s enlightenment was aided by a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union after a member of a political organization passed a metal box containing cash donations through a security checkpoint at Lambert Airport in St. Louis. He was taken to a small room where he was detained, interrogated and told he was under arrest. His “crime” was that he politely asked the agents to explain the scope of their authority.
The ACLU said its concern was that “TSA interpreted its limited authority to safeguard air travel as a license to conduct unlimited law enforcement searches for which TSA agents are not trained and which distracted from the agency’s critical mission of ensuring flight safety.”
With the new directives, the ACLU is dropping the lawsuit. Score one for the Constitution.

Report walks airlines through the world of social media

For the last few years, airlines and other travel companies have tried to figure out what to do about social media.
Since the advent of TripAdvisor in 2000, suppliers at one industry conference after another were warned that they should not ignore the phenomenon. “It’s out there,” speakers would say. “You can’t ignore it.” But suggestions about the appropriate response were uniformly vague.
A new report by Steven Frischling and Addison Schonland of Innovation Analysis Group tackles the problem head-on. Titled “The Airline Industry & Social Media - A must-have strategic guide for airline marketing and sales,” the 62-page report aims to show airline executives what social media can accomplish for them and to walk them through the process of establishing a presence on Twitter, Facebook and other virtual venues.
Airlines can’t be blamed for not intuitively knowing how to get a handle on the concept, the authors noted.
“Twitter, Facebook and MySpace were never designed to be business tools,” Schonland said. “And it’s still so new. It’s still proving itself in so many ways.”
But several airlines have shown that in the right hands, social media can indeed become a powerful tool. While brand awareness is often the initial goal, there are other benefits to be had.
Southwest Airlines, for example, has an active Twitter team that acts on customers’ problems before they escalate into complaints. The report notes that retired chief executive officer Herb Kelleher attributes the reduction in the airline’s U.S. Department of Transportation complaints to this quick intervention.
The report provides a summary of the dos and don’ts of social media, as well as a rollout plan.
If any single event illustrated the need for airlines to understand the power of social media, it was the experience of a Canadian band whose instruments were callously mistreated by United Airlines baggage handlers.
After seeking restitution in vain for more than a year, the band posted a music video titled “United Breaks Guitars” on YouTube in July. At last count, the original video had been viewed more than 5.5 million times. The video has been reposted on sites like Facebook countless times.
The IAG report, produced in association with the Center for Asia Pacific Aviation, analyzes the behavior and experiences of several airlines on Twitter, the current hot social medium, and identifies the good, the bad and the sadly mistaken ways in which it is used.
The first lesson to be learned is that a presence on social media “cannot be created with a view to quickly turn it into a revenue stream,” the report says. “Social media is about relationships first. These systems work on referrals.”
“Airlines are jumping in and out of Twitter because they can’t figure out, ‘How do we jump in and make money?’” Frischling said. But they can’t just “jump in to say, ‘We’re here!’ They need to interact fully.”
The burnout rate on Twitter is “significantly high,” he said.
“One of the big problems is lack of resources. Another is airlines’ inability to determine who this project ‘belongs’ to: Is it the marketing department, communications, customer service?”
The reality, he said, is that the effort “needs to span all those departments. It can’t be kept in a silo.”
Many airline executives, faced with the daunting prospect of learning the Twitter “language” and protocol of # and @ and RT, do what they did when they got their first VCRs: They ask the nearest kid to set it up.
Schonland and Frischling found a number of major airlines that entrusted their Twitter accounts to college interns. “Of course, in September, the interns all go back to school,” Schonland noted.
Interns also are not usually empowered to make customers whole when problems arise; often, they may not even know where to seek help.
The IAG report cites one major U.S. airline that joined Twitter in early August, sent out its first tweet five days later and never responded to the same tweeter more than once. During the last week of the month, 231 complaints about the airline appeared on Twitter.
In addition, 186 direct questions were sent to the airline via Twitter.
Yet it sent out a total of five responses.
The carrier missed 231 opportunities to address complaints and 186 opportunities to respond to direct questions made in a public forum, the report said.
The complaints and question simply went unanswered.
While answering all the questions and complaints can be an impossible task, the report urged airlines to endeavor to address some of them based on priority and validity.
In contrast, JetBlue, Southwest and Virgin America have a high level of interaction with their followers and develop a level of loyalty among them.
For example, JetBlue is interacting frequently with purchasers of its All-You-Can-Jet pass, which offered unlimited travel between Sept. 8 and Oct. 8 for $599. JetBlue encouraged other tweeters to follow the pass users as they traveled and tweeted.
United takes a different approach, using Twitter to distribute distressed merchandise, which it calls “twares” (for Twitter fares). They tend to sell out quickly.
Twitter is more effective than e-mail for these purposes, Schonland said. “E-mail is too long, it has all the graphics, it doesn’t get to the point quickly,” he said.
Twitter, on the other hand, is like “Ding on steroids,” he said. Ding is Southwest’s application that delivers short-term deals to users’ desktops.
The phenomenon of social media is a moving target, making it tricky to determine how to allocate resources.
Notably absent from the report is any mention of Second Life, once the hot new thing just a few years ago.
The love-it-or-hate-it quality of Twitter could also send the medium into cyber-afterlife, “but there will always be something coming up behind it,” Frischling said.
“Airlines need to be there when that something shows up.”

A tale of two airlines on Twitter, and how they tweet

The authors of the IAG report on social media developed a “star chart” to plot airlines’ updates, following, followers, friends and messages in a graphical manner. The data were assembled from public sources.
To get a sense of each airline’s level of interactivity, the authors calculated the ratio of outbound traffic – messages plus updates – divided by the number of followers. The average of the airlines that were studied is 10%.
“This number suggests account managers are generating little outbound traffic relative to their constituencies,” the report states.
JetBlue and British Airways (in North America) were among the carriers whose activity was charted. Here are excerpts from the analysis:
If any airline wants to see what works best, it only needs to look at JetBlue. The airline has a team supporting its Twitter account. This team has been so successful that its members are now frequent speakers at social media events. Imagine that, an airline invited to discuss its success at making a success out of customer service. It has been, and can be, done again.
BA’s North American Twitter activity is clearly way behind the industry average. That said, it has built up a useful number of followers. Clearly it needs to grow it traffic to build dialogue.
But the U.S. operation is likely under direction from the head office and is also limited by being focused on the U.S. However, BA is a global airline, and consequently, the U.S Twitter account could be creating news and information on all points the airline serves.

Attention must be paid

In talking with Henry Harteveldt about the latest Forrester Research report on travelers' dissatisfaction with the online booking experience, I was reminded of my first flight on Southwest Airlines. I was sitting in the first row, and when the plane arrived at the gate, the door opened almost immediately. Having grown accustomed to standing in the aisle and cooling my own jets for several minutes, I was stunned. I asked the flight attendant, "I'm free to go?"

A few days later, I was talking to a friend at another airline. I asked him why it takes most airlines so much longer to hook up the jetway and open the door. He said, "That's because whenever one of our planes lands, it's a surprise. Southwest wants to turn its planes around quickly, so it pays attention."

You have to wonder how much money travel companies are leaving on the table — maybe even actively pushing away — because they are not paying attention to the right things. These are difficult times (I so look forward to never saying those words again), and it's hard to stay focused on customer satisfaction when staffing is at minimum levels and costs are being cut like Yul Brynner's hair. But maybe travel companies could spare a tiny bit of energy for thinking of ways to boost customer satisfaction.

This doesn't necessarily entail throwing tons of money at a problem. Sometimes, just focusing a bit more attention on a particular thing, and making it a priority, can result in some significant improvements.

The naked truth

I seldom get into “write your Congressman” mode – we’re all busy people, after all – but I have written to mine (even though I can’t stand him) to urge him to support H.R. 2027.
This bill reads in part: “Whole-body imaging technology may not be used as the sole or primary method of screening a passenger under this section. Whole-body imaging technology may not be used to screen a passenger under this section unless another method of screening, such as metal detection, demonstrates cause for preventing such passenger from boarding an aircraft.”
Yes, the Transportation Security Administration wants every single airline passenger – that’s you, your mom, your teenage daughter and everybody else who wants to get on a plane – to get naked first. They call it “virtually naked” – the technology allows the screener to see through your clothes – but the result is the same as if you were told to go to a room, take your clothes off and allow some unseen person to check out your goods.
The TSA is in love with these machines. At first, it claimed they would only be used for secondary screening; now they want to replace all airport metal detectors with this virtual strip search. The concept of “probable cause” is tossed out the window.
H.R. 2027 also would make it illegal for anyone to store one of these images. In the past, the TSA has claimed that storing is impossible, but in truth there is an “on-off switch.” Theoretically, a naked picture of your teen could end up on the inside of a screener’s locker door.
We have behaved like sheep long enough, allowing our rights to be trampled. Let’s get behind this bill.

Jobs!

In the next issue of Travel Technology Update, we will introduce a new feature: Jobs.

The name says it all. There are a lot of "unaffiliated" and very talented people out there, and many of them read TTU. If you have an opening within your organization in the field of distribution, revenue management and/or related technologies and disciplines, you can submit the details to me. If space becomes an issue, listings will appear on a first come, first served basis.

There is no cost for running a listing, no fees for snagging a great employee, no cost to respond to a listing. This is simply an extra service that we are providing exclusively to our subscribers, both employers and job-seekers. Employers will be reaching a very qualified group of potential employees at no cost and at no risk. The only requirement is that the employer must be a subscriber.

Oink

May I nominate Michael O’Leary as the biggest swine on earth? The Ryanair chief’s latest pathetic bid for attention came in the form of a pronouncement that swine flu is “only a tragedy for people living in slums in Asia or Mexico.” People who live in other parts of the world aren’t going to die, he stated.

Mr. O’Leary should stick to what he knows best: running a very bad airline. He is not an epidemiologist or a member of the medical profession. Flu viruses are highly unpredictable; they can start out mildly, then roar back with a vengeance, as did the 1918 version that infected a third to a half of the world’s population. In 1973, the so-called London flu, a mutation of the Asian strain, hit Northern California very hard. I came down with it and developed pneumonia. I was out of commission for a month. I consider myself lucky, since many who developed pneumonia died. Let the record show that I was not a slum-dweller.

Mr. O’Leary also needs to be reminded that not all people in Mexico are slum-dwellers. And even those who live in poor neighborhoods are human beings, which is more than I can say for him.