Virgin America, a new low-cost carrier based in San Francisco, is set for an Aug. 8 takeoff. The carrier has faced some turbulent skies due in part to its partial ownership by Richard Branson’s Virgin Group. Initial routes are San Francisco to New York’s JFK and LAX, with additional service from San Francisco to Las Vegas and Washington Dulles planned. Flights from LAX to Las Vegas (August) and Washington Dulles (October) are also planned.
Virgin America is an airline that any technologist will love. See my entry on the technology that Virgin America offers, including a high-end open source entertainment system, live DirecTV, a real power plug (no adapter required) at every seat and inflight Internet access. You can also chat with others on the airplane with seat-to-seat messaging. The in-flight entertainment system offers so many features, it’s the first airline I know of that publishes an acceptable use policy on its Web site.
Initial pricing is cheap with SFO-LAX priced at $44 one way and SFO-JFK at $139. (No roundtrip purchase required.) First class is also offered, at modest prices. A first class ticket from Dulles to San Francisco is $389. A comparable ticket on United is more than $800. I should say “comparable,” because Virgin America offers much more legroom with 55″ seat pitch and massaging seats.
It’s no coincidence that Virgin has chosen routes full of tech savvy travelers. This is likely to put a lot of pressure on United and jetBlue, which offer a lot of service on these routes. Ordinarily, giants like United compete by flooding the market with low-priced seats. The technological advantage may be harder to overcome.
Virgin’s biggest obstacle may be the corporate travel managers who hold back the stampede of travelers who want to fly their airline.
The maps are pretty simple; no satellite views or other cool Google features. They rotate among zoom levels. (My photostream has other examples.) There’s also a promo encouraging you to use Google Maps on the ground.
There are more interesting inflight map experiences. Here’s a YouTube video of Airshow 4200 from Air New Zealand. Most of the airlines I’ve flown use Airshow software, but I haven’t seen this version.
As I was taking off from SFO yesterday, I noticed the Virgin logo on three smaller airplanes. On closer inspection, the Airbuses had Virgin America‘s livery. I was tempted to snap a picture, but resisted out of fear of being tackled by an air marshal.
The airline will be based in San Francisco with initial flights to JFK. Dulles is among the initial airports targeted for expansion.
Virgin Atlantic is one of my favorite airlines. Although U.S. law severely restricts the amount of influence Richard Branson can have on the company (one of DOT’s requirements was that Virgin America replace its CEO because of his ties to Branson), I hope that they can bring some of that high level of service to American aviation.
The planes seem well outfitted for people flying out of the San Francisco area. Among the features touted on Virgin’s Web site: 9″ screens, power ports, RJ-45 and USB jacks and touch-screen food ordering. And that’s in coach. Planes will have Internet access. The Web 2.0 set can use the plane’s seat-to-seat social network to interact with other passengers.
Virgin America even offers a blogger-friendly video of its Linux-based in-flight entertainment features. The video includes some technical details. Virgin says they will also be inviting Linux developers to create custom applications for the IFE.
(If you’re reading this in a feed reader, you may need to click through to the post to see the video.)
Google is offering flight status information via SMS. Just send your flight number (e.g. UA 484) to GOOGLE (466453) and you get a return message with flight departure and arrival times, gate information and the airline’s phone number. (With most phones you can extract the phone number and call without having to re-enter the number.)
Flight information is a great SMS application – it requires little input and the answer can be delivered in 160 characters or less. It’s faster than trying to use the mobile Web browser to get to the airline’s Web site and navigate through the menus. And it sure beats trying to get the information through the voice-activated phone system.
Many airlines already provide the option to get mobile alerts automatically. United EasyUpdate sent me an alert two hours before my departure from Dulles last week. Unfortunately, in that two hours they moved my flight to a gate half way across the terminal.
Farecast is one of my favorite sites for checking out airfares. It’s a data junkie’s dream – Farecast does for airfares what Zillow does for real estate data.
You can slice and dice airfare data in a number of different ways. Want to go to San Diego for 3 or 4 days, but don’t care when? Farecast will show you the cheapest dates to start your trip. Want to somewhere for 4 days for under $200? Farecast will show you where you can go.
In addition to the usual information that travel sites provide, Farecast shows you a history of the lowest available fare for your trip. It also provides a forecast of whether fares will go up, down or stay the same.
TechCrunch writes about a new feature called Fare Guard that will lock in the fare that you find. They will reimburse you the difference between the fare that you lock in and the lowest fare on the day you buy your ticket. (Within 7 days.) It’s sort of like an option to buy airfare.
Although it’s not quite as bad a deal as an extended warranty, it’s unlikely to be a good deal:
The service is only available on fares that predicted to go down. If you believe their predictions are accurate, you shouldn’t be buying anyway.
The fare that is “guarded” is only the lowest possible fare for that date, not for specific flights. There is often a lot of variability in fares from flight to flight (even on the same airline) on the same day. Let’s say your ideal flight is at 5 p.m. and priced at $350 on the day you purchase the service, and that’s the lowest fare for the day. Five days later, the 5 p.m. flight is up to $450, but the lowest priced flight is at 9 a.m. and costs $350. You get nothing and you’re out the $10.
Fare Guard doesn’t take into account airline preference. You find a United flight today at $350 and the lowest fare, on US Airways is $325. When you book, the United flight is $500 and the lowest fare on US Airways is still $325. Again, you get nothing.
Fare Guard doesn’t allow for airport preference. If you’re in a market with multiple airports like New York, DC, San Francisco or Los Angeles, you have to pick an airport to lock in. Just as with specific flights, fares can vary by hundreds of dollars from one airport to another.
The regular price for the service is $9.95 and the maximum possible payout is $200. You’re essentially betting $10 that the price of your flight will increase in the next 7 days. If the fare goes up $25, you’re up $15.05 for the hassle of buying the insurance and filing a claim.
If you care about when you fly or what airline you fly, Fare Guard is a waste of money.
As an experienced traveler who has watched the airline industry closely, I wouldn’t buy it. Would I bet against it as a business? Not a chance.
Warranty Week, an industry publication, [in 2005] estimated that of the $15 billion in premiums charged consumers in 2004, $7.5 billion went straight into the pockets of the stores that sell warranties as their cut.
I was playing with Kayak and found a feature that’s interesting to explore – a map of where people want to travel. You enter an airport and it will show you the top 25 searched for destinations from that airport.
Route lines are color-coded so that you can pick out which routes are more expensive. One nit I would pick is that the color coding is relative to the other destinations on the current map. On one map a route that is red could be $250 and on another map it could be $1,000.
If looking at the map gets you in the mood to travel, you can limit the results to those that fall in your price range or timeframe.
The travel business generates so much data; it’s great to see someone putting that data to good use. Now they just need to come up with a catchy name for it. Travelocity isn’t using Dream Maps anymore.
I got an email from United Airlines yesterday announcing a closed beta test of a new version of United.com with enhanced booking, Mileage Plus account information and better award travel booking. (Which is sorely needed.)
United offered a carrot of a 15% discount on my next flight in exchange for completing a survey about the site. The catch: only the first 20,000 respondents get the discount.
So I spent 5 minutes on the site and about 2 minutes on the survey. Bad incentive, bad data.
If they had said anyone who responds within the next week gets the discount, they would have gotten better data because I would have used the site for real needs.
It’s too bad, because I actually use all of these tools and would have real feedback to offer. They’ll just have to read my blog.
United keeps moving my cheese. In a few days, United is dramatically increasing the number of miles required for a free award ticket to Australia. Trying to beat the increase, I called up United to try to book tickets. (I would book online, but United has one of the worst award booking interfaces in the industry.)
Knowing that seats are hard to come by I was prepared to be flexible. The agent asked when I wanted to travel.
“February.”
“You don’t have a specific date in mind?”
“The tickets are probably hard to come by, whenever you can find them.”
After about 10 minutes of typing he has worked his way to mid-February and lets me know he’s still working. Another 5 minutes or so and he has exhausted the month.
“How about March?” He puts me on hold. It could be worse; at least I get to listen to “Rhapsody in Blue”.
After another 10 minutes or so, he comes back on the line to tell me there are no seats available in the entire month of March.
Probably sensing that I was about to say, “What about April?” he said “There’s a problem with my system. Would you mind calling back?”
All told, 24 minutes of agent time spent on a fruitless task.
If the airlines are going to allocate such few seats to award inventory, they should at least make it easier to find what is available. There’s no way in the United system (according to the agent) to find the next available date. He had to search each day individually.
Where’s the business model in providing better tools?
Reduced call center expenses. The 24 minutes the agent spent with me was time that could have been spent generating revenue.
Decreasing the liability of miles. Airlines record miles as a liability on their balance sheet. It’s in their interest to fill seats that would otherwise go empty.
Prevent the collapse of their micro economies. Think of each frequent flier program as a micro economy. The more airlines devalue their miles by raising award levels or making available seats hard to find, the less the public will care about accumulating miles. This can turn into a significant problem for the airlines, because they make a lot of money selling miles to partners such as credit card companies. Chase/BankOne/First USA has been one of United’s biggest backers during its bankruptcies, largely because of the promotional power of Mileage Plus miles in driving wallet share of Chase VISA cards.
I hate to check bags. I hate the wait to see if the airline has lost my bag. And the wait to talk to the overworked agents who have to deal with grumpy customers.
Because of the idiotic new “security” rules, I checked a bag on my recent trip to Dublin. After more than 40 minutes of watching the bags go round and round I decided mine wasn’t coming and I went to file a report. Another 15 or so minutes of waiting in line got me to the counter where the agent instantly pronounced that my bag was on the next flight.
With positive passenger bag match, the airlines are required to verify that passenger bags loaded on a plane match the passenger manifest. In many cases, they know that your bag isn’t on the plane before it even takes off.
They should share that information with you, instead of making you wait around the carousel for bags that they know won’t be arriving. Maybe an announcement on the flight or a display next to the baggage carousel indicating whose bags didn’t make the flight. They could be even more proactive and have the paperwork started when you arrive at the baggage office.
Although positive-bag match is a fake security measure (it presupposes that terrorists wouldn’t commit suicide), as long as it is in place, airlines should use the data it generates to better serve customers.
“The Body Shop, which has 16 airport stores in the USA, will no longer require its clerks at shops inside security checkpoints to ask customers if they’re arriving or departing passengers, says marketing executive Kim Burrs.
Since August, the retailer has sold liquid or gel products only to those confirming that they just landed to prevent them from running into trouble with TSA.
The company closed nearly half of its airport stores immediately after the TSA’s decision in August but reopened them within a week.”
So during the ban on gels and liquids, The Body Shop was selling large bottles of liquids and gels inside the sterile area, relying on the word of travelers that they were arriving and not about to get on a plane with 12 ounces of contraband? The TSA and the airports allowed this? Yet another loophole in the faux fight against terrorism.
In the new regime, travelers can take on board up to 3 ounces of liquids or gels as long as they can fit within a single quart-sized plastic bag.
I wish I hadn’t sold my Proctor & Gamble stock. Those travel size toiletries have huge margins.
Virgin America, a new low-cost carrier based in San Francisco, is set for an Aug. 8 takeoff. The carrier has faced some turbulent skies due in part to its partial ownership by Richard Branson’s Virgin Group. Initial routes are San Francisco to New York’s JFK and LAX, with additional service from San Francisco to Las Vegas and Washington Dulles planned. Flights from LAX to Las Vegas (August) and Washington Dulles (October) are also planned.
As I was taking off from SFO yesterday, I noticed the Virgin logo on three smaller airplanes. On closer inspection, the Airbuses had 
