Airline Technology and Innovation Gap

Last week was Spring break, and we decided to leave sunny Seattle for cloudy San Diego for a little family vacation. Yup, while we were in San Diego wishing for some sun, Seattle was warm and sunny… It figures All in all, we had a great time, especially our 9-year-old in LegoLand, at least up until our return flight.

Given the aging airline fleet, and the higher demands on air travel, it is becoming more common to witness late departures or cancelled flights. However, this experience clearly shows the innovation gap in the airline industry, and numerous opportunities to improve the overall customer experience. Plus, this made it to my top three worst-ever non-weather-related airline experiences, so it is worth sharing.

Here is the timeline of events that led to the cancelation of our Alaska flight from San Diego to Seattle. We were originally scheduled to depart Sunday at 6:24pm, but ended up leaving 12:24pm on Monday. Note, these are all approximate times.

• 6:15pm: The prior Seattle flight boarded our plane due to mechanical problems they experienced with theirs.
• 7:15pm: We are informed that the part needed to fix the broken plane is in transit, and we should be well on our way by 10pm.
• 9:40pm: We are told they are not able to fix the problem. However, they are diverting another plane, and our expected departure time is now 10:45pm.
• 10:20pm: The pre-boarding process starts. After 10 mins of waiting for the doors to open, we are notified that there is a mechanical problem with a circuit breaker on the replacement plane, and they need to do further testing.
• 10:50pm: Our only gate agent disappears, leaving us wondering…
• 11:00pm: Everyone notices the blue screen of death, and smiles as the terminal screens reboots at precisely 11pm (but we also note that their clocks are set to midnight).
• 11:05pm: The gate agents walk out of the jet-way, reminding me of the slow motion heros walk in the movies. As they say, there is safety in numbers. They inform us that the flight is canceled and they start the rebooking process.
• 11:15pm: An unhappy customer throws crumbled paper towards the agents. One of the Alaskan gate agent walks away due to the hostile situation. Neither behavior was appropriate, needless to say. Btw, the crumbled paper was Alaska’s customer relationship number.
• 12:00am: Our luggage arrives at the baggage carousel, almost a full hour after the flight was cancelled. There was much confusion about which baggage delivery device the bags would appear on, probably confused by the fact that this luggage was not being delivered to its destination, but rather its source.
• 12:05am: We finally walk out of the airport and arrive at the hotel shuttle service waiting area. It turns out that the hotel shuttle service does not operate after midnight, and the hotel is sending a town car for 80+ people.
• 12:10am: We beg & pleat a taxi driver to take us less than 2 miles to the airport hotel (he is sure that there is a hotel shuttle). As we approach the hotel, he cracks up with laughter watching all the taxis pull over to the hotel entrance.
• 12:20am: As we are checking into the hotel, the person tells how surprised they are to see all the people showing up. The hotel was not notified of the canceled flight and the flood of new customers.
• 12:25am: We are the first of the flight to actually make it to our hotel room. We left a long line of checkins at the counter, and more at the airport. It is now that we notice that the dinner certificate handed out by the airlines cannot be used, as the restaurants stop serving food after 12:30am.
• 11:45am: After a nice rest and a great breakfast (where the dinner certificate had to be combined with the breakfast certificated, and still barely covered the cost), we started boarding our new, new flight on time. As we were boarding the flight, we heard the announcement “The 9am flight that was delayed due to mechanical problems should be fixed and ready to depart by 1pm.” Yikes! It seems that the broken plane from the night before still hadn’t been fixed by morning. Good thing we decided to sleep in and go on the second flight out.
• 3:10pm: As we are waiting for our checked luggage in the Seattle airport, we note that the 9am flight that was scheduled to depart by 1pm was now scheduled for 4:30pm arrival, over an hour after our flight landed. As a note, most of the passengers from the previous night were booked on that 9am flight, to get them to Seattle as soon as possible……..

Delays and cancelations are inevitable. However, better operations and risk management will certainly ease the pain that the airline and the customers feel. There are plenty of thresholds that an airline could watch for that could trigger a set of actions.

• Detection of mechanical failure: Automatic initiation of wait-listing customers to the next available flights. Today, this is manually initiated by the customer.
• Service triggered events: Usage of a given part, its previous history or trends on the given airplane could trigger automatic recall for service.
• Grounded airplane or customers: After certain hour of waiting, say about 3hrs, it should be obvious whether the given flight is a go/no-go. Based on available planes, the airline should be able to decide to cancel the flight.
• Notification of partners in the ecosystem: Cancelation in the system should automatically notify the required partners from airport baggage handling, to shuttle services and hotel personnel.
• Cancelation triggered activities: I always wondered why airline agents type so much on the computer, even for small queries. The rebooking process literally took 10-15mins per person. This should be as automated as possible, and even before the cancellation is announced the needed information (hotel, reservations, …) should be printed and handed to the customers.

As a note, it is obvious that the airlines are not equipped to handle crisis, as displayed in the behavior of the Alaska gate agents. Maybe this is an opportunity for a firm focused on handling small-scale crisis to get into the picture to improve customer experience.

Thank you for letting me whine/vent/fume. Your regularly scheduled blog will return later this week. Stay tuned.