Part of the Process

I love travelling, not because of going to new places - although that is great! - but because I enjoy the journey. Mainly because I'm a travel and systems thinking nerd. My latest holiday was a chance to look at airlines and airports in a different way. Scheduled flights to hubs for business are one thing, package holidays to small airports proved another thing entirely. In fact, comparing Gatwick airport to Heraklion it is a good example of this quote The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.   William Gibson It got me thinking about two major challenges to objectives of the IATA fast travel program being the norm across the whole industry. Culture The first is customer culture. Self-service common use technology is still in its infancy. Previously there has been a consistent expectation for example of what travel means, and how desks work, this is now being replaced with different tech and varying security rules. For example, even a large

This week I spent half a day at the Simpli F lying Airline Marketing Innovation Lab . This kicked off the of the build-up to the Aviation Festival. There were a range of people from different airlines attending. Covering social media and marketing roles. I was part of the "disruption communications" rotation, so got to hear a range of approaches to the different scenarios.  One thing that is striking about airlines is how open they are about most operational matters - just don't ask them to share commercial details like ancillary deals! But that's probably as how airlines deal with communications or customer service is closely aligned to their brand. Even if they use the same tool or know the techniques of another airline it may not make sense in their context. EasyJet is different from BA who are different again from Emirates.  I wish I could share more from the day, but I'll leave with this. The customer service professionals at airlines aren't uncar

Industry verticals can be big beasts. I work in "travel" or "travel tech", depending on how granular the segmentation gets. But this covers a range of people who have many different needs. It also covers many different levels of accessibility to the problem.  This week I'll take a look at a variety of blog posts in "Travel tech". Written by those involved in solving different problems in the same vertical. The experience and accessibility to the problem area isn't evenly distributed. On the one hand, many people have experienced booking a holiday or catching a taxi. By comparison not as many have communicated to passengers following an airline schedule change. Consumers making a travel booking   I would like to contrast two different approaches here. The first is the the developer with access to the API calls . It is now possible for anyone to create booking apps with relative ease. I love the fact Arun's use case was "her

How to explain revenue mange ment to normal people... This year's TTI summer conference was around the idea of "money for nothing" - that is doing effective revenue management to get more profit without any extra product or inventory. Like most of the professions in and around travel, it should come as no surprise that data analytics and supporting business decisions effectively seemed to be the main theme of the morning.  There were three speakers covering various aspects. Deniz Dorbek from Wyndham Hotel Group started by talking about "Total revenue management" from a hotel point of view. This included exploiting spa, sports, food and beverage, meetings as well as room rates. A key point in her summary was around people in revenue management communicating and working closely with the marketing and online analytics teams to ensure success.  Dimitrios Hiotis from Simon-Kucher and Partners is from a tour operator background and introduced tools at TUI

I have been struggling to write a summary of The Lean Event and Phocuswright Europe as they both packed in so much content, I have so many notes to read through! Taking the two together it's clear to me that they are natural complements. Indeed Umesh Pandya's talk on "Learing to build wayfindr: independant travel for blind people" would not have been out of place at Phocuswright, just as Gary Morrison's afternoon keynote on Expedia Worldwide could have been a Lean Event session on lean in the enterprise. So i'll pick a couple of sessions from each to talk about. From The Lean Event  There were so many good sessions over the two days, but I'll briefly talk about Jared Spool's keynote on "Building a winning UX strategy" for this insight on Innovation alone - innovation is the space between current experience and aspirational experience. The simplicity of looking at innovation as gap between frustration and aspiration/delight was qui

In the run up to a 15below customer conference I always seem to attend another event with some similarities elsewhere. This year was no different with the Travel Technology Initiative Spring Conference in London around the topic of the "UX revolution" that has been occurring in travel over the past couple of years. The first of the stand-out talks for me were Anna Chomse, Industry Head - Travel at Google who showed the process going from exploring holiday options to booking, with the different needs at each stage. She then showed a few examples of good design reflecting those needs, and how sea r ch terms used or platform (such as mobile) can make a difference to the experience of using the site. Thomson holidays was one example of how to do it right. (The Hoover website with its search terms not in the user's language and confusing mobile experience was an example of how not to do it) Next Sam Crowther, Head of Creative at Bauer Radio then took us on journey throug

Leaving Athens Following on from my last trip to the SITA Summit in 2014  this year's SITA Forum in Athens had similar themes, but with a more airport focused audience. I think my biggest take away is that self-service is important ; not just as a method in cutting costs but also in improving the passenger experience ( #PaxEx ) via two main factors - control and information. Control To pick out the two salient illustrations of this, for control I'll turn to Patrice About from AirFrance. He made the point that consumer bag tracking devices now available for about $50, and these aren't under airline control or put in baggage with their knowledge. So the industry faces a choice - either find a way to work with passengers bring their own device or bury head in sand and have pax that are better informed than airline agents when a bag has been put on the wrong aircraft. This trend is happening now, the good news for airlines is that bag tag devices are GPS/sim based and m

So a couple of weeks since the Apple Watch launch and I have read then thought a bit more since my initial feelings . So I thought I'd round up the best on the web so far with some of my own thoughts. As someone whose phone spends most of the day on the desk in front of me, this cartoon made me chuckle The harsh reality of the "smart" watch #AppleWatch #Wearables pic.twitter.com/diHhN1XtVD — Theo Priestley (@ITredux) March 11, 2015 it's a believable world where the watch is just an accessory for a phone. To me apps as providers to a new watch UI framework makes sense as Pebble are proposing in their latest kickstarter. This follows the kind of process from when desktop applications were shrunk to fit smartphones and the way that we use/interact with "apps" is different now. (I think that it's also reasonable to assume that way we use apps will also change in the same way desktop programs have become much more app like). This feels like a much

Early morning view of Cayo Las Brujas I have recently returned from a trip that was like walking into a living case study into why I have helped 15below produce the software it does for the past decade. I was a on a twin centre trip to Cuba and on arrival our rep gave us the pickup time to leave Havana which was very early (3am!). We queried this to confirm it was correct and simply told "yes, 3 am". What we later found out was that it was the start of pickups and NOT a specific time. In addition, ours was the last hotel. we had no information on flight number or a published flight schedule (later found out it's a very informal timetable, leaves when everyone has turned up!) Now if waiting for nearly two hours, before even boarding a coach to the airport at that time, weren't bad enough the hotel staff weren't that interested and the telephones using the hotel phones couldn't get through to the rep's number - it didn't help that I don't spe

Brighton Sea front frosted 2 I didn't anticipate quite so many examples   to my December blog post  on disruption and communication  so soon.  As a follow up I'd like to briefly mention some of these,  ranging from at best inconvenient and stressful experiences  to the frightening and life taking. Taking the first and the seeming inability of the British rail system to cope with our seasons. They suffer with trust and respect as a lot of the people using the system for holiday travel are also regular commuters. Indeed my Facebook feed has a number of people complaining that they have to put up with this all year round.  With the scenes at Finsbury Park and the snow closing  Liverpool’s John Lennon Airport and Leeds Bradford International airport , it's got to have a knock on with passenger trust and with the relatively trivial nature of the impact there isn't much opportunity for the companies involved to show respect. Apart from maybe top execs giving up thei

I don't usual write about my workplace directly on social media or this blog. But today I'm just going to briefly touch on some of what makes it a good place to work for me. Basically for me a good work place always boils down to two things 1) the people and 2) a general sense of inquisitiveness. Working Late by Thomas Høyrup Christensen I work for 15below a software development company that specialises in the travel industry. It's fair to say we are probably market leaders in the kind of workflow driven notifications that we do. We have internal tools that started for a particular business need and are now side projects such as Gallifrey, what I love watching here is how is allows people to play with techniques that aren't always useful in the day job - such as click once deployment in github We also have internal tools, which are part of say our build chain, that get open sourced - such as the aptly named  Build.Tools  or fixes to how packaging works in

Beach Snowman Xmas cards available As the festive season gets into full swing, I am glad that I am not reliant on using mass public transport before I can relax and enjoy myself this year. Especially after reading the news this morning - predicting rail disruption caused by  floods in the mild weather .  For around the past decade my day job has involved helping travel companies in passenger communications; as distilled into these top tips of  The 3 Big Ideas In Managing Passenger Disruption  or in  Managing Travel Disruption  that looks at more crisis orientated passenger communications. [edit: these links are now dead, more up-to-date take on  Disruption management: Your opportunity to impress  or  Travel Disruption Management: Tech Opportunities in the Travel Industry ] But from the small journeys that I have taken in the past week, whether by bus or train, one takeaway has been that small delays can be frustrating when you don't know the reason or trust the information

This week I have been purchasing the photos from the running events that I've taken part in this year. One thing that I like, about getting several sets at the same time, is that it allows me to look at the user experience I come away with from each photo solution. So here I'm going to briefly compare two sites and think about any lessons I could draw for the travel industry, since that's where I work. The first experience I just wanted to discuss two different sites that left me quite different feelings. The first looked like a user forum from about 10 years ago. The search on race number takes you to page dominated by the search tool and other screen furniture about the gallery. This is followed by thumbnails of the matching photos. Clicking on any of these photos then takes you to the screen below, with various purchasing options including confusingly "All my images". There are some Google ads, which when looking at a friends images had an amusing