Traditional airline pricing is mostly associated
with stationary class differentiation based mainly on seat comfort,
availability of food service, baggage allowances, or flight rescheduling.
They don’t take into account the growing
disruptiveness of air travel, especially at busiest airports. Just because it
goes beyond algorithms.
Today, even the highest-fare
passengers experience long delays, lose connections, queue at various stages of
their journey, spend time and extra money while waiting for the departure of
their delayed flight, or have to rearrange their travel. Often, they are not
prioritised as expected, and getting help during and after flight cancellations
is not guaranteed.
And, with usually high load
factors, chances to rebook to the next flight are becoming slimmer.
While insurance policies may
absorb some of the costs of poor experience, they cannot compensate for the
frustration, stress, anger, and other kinds of emotions of fragile, robust, and
even antifragile passengers associated with unexpectedly long and poorly
handled interruptions to their journeys.
Disruptions are a classless
experience. There will be much more of them in the foreseeable
future considering the state of the industry and how airlines are
organised and managed.
Isn’t it time to rethink the
pricing policies and introduce more flexibility in passenger choices when their
travel plans are significantly changed against their will?
These could be things like:
you pay a bit more for making sure that flight delays longer than xx hours will
be automatically processed (rather than entering a messy procedure for
compensation claims with uncertain outcome).
Or, what about an option to
stay longer in a city in which you experienced flight cancellation and
reschedule your flight to a day and time that suits both you and the
airline.
Or, why not offering a
discount to passengers that are flexible about their return date or even
airport and be in a win-win situation.
There are many more options
that, apart from reducing the amount of stress and getting some more space for
other passengers at critical times airlines can get more return passengers and
count on their loyalty. A great way to boost revenue.
The question is, can a
combination of human-computer intelligence speed up this process?
