John Morhous, Chief Experience Officer, Flight Centre Travel Group
Imagine this scenario: Your
partner's birthday is coming up, and you want to do something special. They
love steak, so you hop online and find a new steakhouse in town with good
reviews and make a reservation. The photos look great, and the ambiance seems perfect
for a birthday celebration. A few days beforehand you call the restaurant and
order a birthday cake to be delivered during dessert to make it extra special.
When the night arrives, you
walk into the restaurant and notice the interior doesn’t match the online
photos. Undeterred, you take your seat and order. An hour passes, you grow
concerned and you check on the food. The server says the kitchen is “backed
up,” despite an hour wait already. When the food finally arrives, it’s lukewarm.
Because you are starving, you eat it—at least the special cake is next! Signaling
to the server to bring it over, he hastily tells you “Sorry, the pastry chef
quit yesterday, and we don’t have any desserts.” You pay the bill and depart,
the evening ruined.
You retrace the experience in
your mind, with a lot of questions:
- Why didn’t the photos online match the restaurant’s
interior?
- Why didn’t they tell me the kitchen was behind so we
could have ordered an appetizer?
- Why was the food delivered lukewarm? Was it sitting
out? Was our server just terrible?
- Why didn’t they tell me when I walked in the door (or
sooner) that the birthday cake wasn’t going to happen?
None of these questions are
unreasonable; you expect certain things from a restaurant dining because you’ve
experienced hundreds of them. None of your expectations were out of the
ordinary, even ordering a birthday cake. With such poor delivery on them, you
would give anyone who asked a blistering earful of how awful that restaurant
experience was, never to return. Your online review would include particulars
so others could avoid the same outcome.
So… why am I talking about
dining in 2023, rather than travel?
The experience of dining out is
surprisingly complex. There are a lot of moving parts (and people) necessary to
deliver a simple meal, let alone a special one. It is a tightly orchestrated
collaboration between service, meal preparation and timely delivery. It takes a
larger and more integrated array of people and suppliers to make a business
trip hassle-free and successful, but the level of collaboration between both
scenarios is comparable.
All it takes is one bad
experience to turn you off from ever going to that same restaurant, or flying
that airline, again. So, why do so many business trips feel like the same bad
night out at the same restaurant you just keep going to time and time again?
In the past month, we’ve seen
some unprecedented collapses to the travel ecosystem. It started over the
holidays when Southwest Airlines suffered a now infamous meltdown that is
projected to have an impact
of nearly $850M to its results. Add to
that, the FAA had a system
failure which resulted in the first U.S.
domestic ground stop since 9/11, that impacted over 10,000 flights across the
country and caused cascading headaches for days. These would be the foodservice
equivalent of losing your dinner reservation, serving you the wrong food, cold
and then overcharging you for it on the bill…all at once. Unlike restaurants,
there aren’t so many options that offer better alternatives when a customer has
a bad experience. Frequent business travelers, as a result, end up suffering
through an ever-present set of potential calamities associated with modern
travel, just hoping that the next experience as bad as the last. We have been
conditioned for so long to expect the worst that we are surprised when it is
not.
That said, as a travel industry
executive, I work closely with all our suppliers, particularly airlines. I
empathize with their struggles in delivering excellent customer experiences.
Operating an airline requires a lot of capital to buy planes, working with
labor unions to fly them, dealing with government agencies regulating the
airspace, using airports that are often run by slow-moving local municipalities
and—most importantly—establishing a complex global supply chain that must operate
from Cape Town to Cleveland, while managing ever-present safety and security rules.
Let’s be honest, food arriving
cold is quite different than a plane falling out of the sky. It’s hard work,
and we get it.
Are We Focused on the Right
Solutions—or Even the Right Problem?
Business startup Rule No. 1 is
to solve a customer problem in a unique way, or in a way that is significantly
better than what everyone else is doing.
That ethos has fueled modern
technology that underpins a world full of Google Maps, self-driving cars,
real-time weather alerts and artificial intelligence that can do my kids’
homework. Each innovation had a customer pain point behind it and a relentless
drive to make things better. As a result, our lives are much easier compared to
the prior generation.
So why can’t we better anticipate
travel-related issues in this modern world? Why aren’t we leveraging all these
tech advancements we’re so accustomed to in our personal life to make the
corporate travel experience better?
The airline technology conversation
today is nearly fully focused on NDC, even more so now with American Airlines announcing it will
pull content from non-NDC channels in April.
In comparison to the dining experience, moving from EDIFACT to NDC distribution
is the workflow equivalent of the restaurant deciding to either use a paper
menu or a digital one scanned via QR code (If you’re scoffing at that analogy, think
about it.)
Is that all we have to talk
about right now?
The Southwest and FAA issues
were both blamed on outdated computer systems, one around managing crew
movements during a disruption, the other around notifying aircraft of things
going on in the U.S. airspace. Both are critical to ensuring the reliability
and safety of flying. As a technologist, I can understand and appreciate that
airlines and air traffic control is mission-critical stuff, so it probably
shouldn’t be living on the bleeding edge of modern computing technology. But
maybe if we had something built this century it would be a tad more
reliable? FYI, the “cloud” has been around for over two decades.
NDC will not address any of
these issues. I would love the industry to get back to its roots in 2023,
solving real customer problems today, as that is where value and commercial
benefit sits. Here are some questions I have when I think about my recent experiences.
- If I can track my kid going to
the mall through Find My iPhone, why are my bags missing? I’d
like an AirTag in my annual frequent flier package instead of drink coupons I
will lose by myself.
- If the flight is going to be
late, why can’t you just tell me? If I’m sitting at the gate and can literally
see no plane parked, why do I feel like the first to know it won’t be on time?
- If I qualify to go to your
lounge, can you tell me so? What has always been a huge perk in the travel experience
that has seen a lot of investment, now feels like you need a PhD to understand.
- If security is backed up, why
don’t you tell me to come earlier, or go to a different line at the airport? Most
airports have multiple lines you can use to go through security...
-
If I’m disrupted and entitled
to compensation or re-accommodation, offer to provide it hassle-free through
your branded credit card? I can get travel rewards through a hundred different
banks; but not having to file claims and chase paperwork (when an airline is responsible
for the disruption) would make your offer that much more compelling.
- If you can’t manage to get your
customer support above a CSAT of 50 percent, why make it harder for those who
do your support for you? Rolled out rashly without the kinks worked out, NDC will
do that even to the most technically adept TMCs who can support it.
- Finally, with so much talk
about understanding the customer, how do you not know who I am when I give you
my loyalty info? Facebook can track me across multiple websites when I’m online,
and Amazon sends me ads for the last thing I searched for on Google, so I’m not
sure why I’m constantly asked if I’m going to check a bag on my overnight business
trip to Dallas (I’m not.)
Perhaps all of this sounds futuristic and
far-fetched, but sometimes we all need to be reminded—you go to a restaurant to
eat a meal, not to order it off the menu.