Did You Check In for Your Flight Yet?
Flying in 2018 isn’t all that different from flying in 1998. But everything around it has changed dramatically. Not only has flying become so incredibly cheap over the last twenty years that it hardly makes sense to use any other mode of transportation. (Well, except for environmental reasons of course – hashtagsarcasm.) The way we book not just flights, but entire trips has also changed drastically over the past twenty years. And yet we are still a long way from the “mobility as a service” or the “from A to B with just one service” so often proclaimed in the service design industry.
The problem
The underlying problem is a fairly simple one from the users perspective. For a journey from point A to point B, I want as little friction as possible. Ideally, I would just book a holiday destination at a certain date and every step, every mode of transport, every transfer point and so on that I have to take to reach my destination would be transparently shown to me and booked automatically. I would see the total sum directly, without any hidden cost or extras and not have to worry about anything else. That is the ideal scenario. Just how far away from it we still are becomes clear every time you actually take a trip yourself.
Now Booking
It starts right at the booking stage. On various platforms you do a first bit of scouting for accommodation to get an overview of what’s on offer and what rooms cost at your chosen destination. In parallel, you run the odd Google search hoping to land directly on the pages of guesthouses and hotels and, ideally, to book directly with the accommodation itself. This has the advantage above all that you’re not badgered by the platform you booked through with recommendations for all sorts of additional extras or special services.
Which brings us straight to the next point. These days you almost no longer have any way of missing a trip, because the accommodation booking portal alone reminds you with several emails a week that the trip is coming up soon. On each such occasion you’re once again offered the rental car you never wanted in the first place, and alongside a whole range of extras you’re repeatedly pitched special events at your destination that you can book “right now” with a single click. Whether I wanted these to begin with or not plays no role whatsoever.
Now, in the age of modern email programs, these floods of email are relatively easy to get under control. Set up a few filters that sort the annoying emails into a corresponding folder, which you can then delete regularly without missing anything and without your inbox being crushed by the excess of special offers.
Sometimes you do actually receive useful information that directly concerns the trip you’ve booked, telling you that a flight or a hotel has been cancelled and that you’ll need to switch to a different flight or a different hotel instead. Depending on the provider, these are even clearly worded and clearly designed, and some providers even politely refrain from pushing further offers you could book instead.
But not all providers are kind enough to mark these emails differently, so some of them are accidentally filed away by the “travel spam filter.” That’s why, from time to time, you have to go to the trouble of checking again manually and, for the future, switching providers.
Just before the day of travel itself, things really get going. That’s when you have to make sure you check in yourself and your luggage everywhere it’s relevant, sort out getting to the train station and/or airport, and do the same at your destination for the journey from the airport or station to your final stop. The “last-mile problem,” as many mobility service providers already call it, is in my view not even the most bothersome factor. Of course I’ll surely welcome it when we reach the point where you can get from home to the airport and from the destination airport to the hotel simply by stepping into a vehicle already waiting for you there, but for 80% of my trips the local public transport has so far been enough, and for the remaining twenty percent the taxi has repeatedly proven a convenient method.
I should point out here that the overwhelming majority of my trips take place in Europe, where the public transport and taxi networks are very dense and very well developed. The few intercontinental trips I’ve taken so far, however, worked just as smoothly.
Long Live the Smartphone
Travel is one of those situations where the smartphone really shines. It is the central computer of every trip. With it you can do all the things that twenty years ago still required a counter at the airport. You can book trips and rebook them. Check in. You can see where you currently are, check exchange rates and, while still on one mode of transport, already book the next. Granted, you still have to switch between a handful of applications to do so, but you accept that inconvenience if it lets you book your trip smoothly in return.
It is a little annoying, though, that I have to switch back and forth between 7 different apps on my phone to make these trips happen. I have to be registered with all of them, and with half of them I have to create a profile. That’s presumably the price you pay if you want to save money on your travels. The travel budget sadly isn’t enough to fly Lufthansa all the time, and so I just accept the flexibility that’s forced upon me.
But every time you open a new app to check your flight status or something similar, or to check in, with most providers you first have to click your way through colourful advertising before you get to where you actually want to be. And even if you’ve already declined five times that you want a rental car at your destination, you’ll be asked a sixth time as well. t’s very tedious.
And with all this technology we already have, you have to wonder why there isn’t a single travel app where all of this comes together. Here you would simply enter your origin and destination and the app would automatically offer you various pre-selected routes in between, which you could filter by different criteria such as duration, price, comfort and so on. With one click you could then complete a booking, and in the background all the relevant bookings would be handled for me. On the day of travel I would then check myself and my luggage in just once, in an app that doesn’t shout cheap offers I don’t want at me, and would then simply arrive at my destination at some point. That, at least, is the ideal scenario, one that many other people who are on the move a lot surely share besides me. It’s ironic that this was actually the way we travelled back in the days of analogue travel agencies. But at some point we simply no longer wanted to pay the surcharge that this service adds to a trip.
There are various other reasons why this can’t work. Who should be allowed to offer this app? You would create a monopoly position in the travel market that we wouldn’t be happy with either. Imagine a company in which all the data we hand over converges, which then books us a trip and shows us a price of which we again wouldn’t know how real it is and how much it’s based on our data. That would be a kind of travel Facebook and would probably be closely watched by all the competition authorities, or banned outright.
Presumably we’ll simply have to wait again until Apple or Google builds such a service directly into the operating systems of their smartphones, one that then “neutrally” links together the data of various providers, and we could pay for the whole thing via Apple Pay or with our phone bill. That would surely be the most convenient way of travelling, but it would then also make competition harder for direct providers.
You almost have to wonder why the railway, instead of only seeing itself in competition with the aeroplane, doesn’t enter into better or closer cooperations with various providers that would allow you to book a route from A to B directly through the railway app or a shared travel app, one on which the railway then plays a role again too.
AI to the “rescue”
The various LLM companies tried to get their foot in the door with positioning their products as the one stop solution that can be integrated into a web browser and then autonomously help you with exactly this scenario as an independent facilitator for planning and booking your trip, but so far this has not materialized yet for various reasons.
The Misery of Multiple Trips
Everything I’ve written so far assumes that I’m only booking one trip, which I then take. Like most people book their summer holiday, a special occasion where you do not mind to spend more time and effort for the planning. But anyone who has to travel often for work is left to do all the fiddly work of booking trips, planning the itinerary and handing in the receipts.
It’s Time for a Concierge Service
The concierge has come quite a long way from the hotel and building entrance, increasingly becoming a feature in numerous “intelligent” devices such as cars, smartphones and tablets. These digital assistants are meant to make our lives easier by letting us hand off precisely a portion of these worries to the “concierge.” In most cases, however, this is nothing more than a euphemism for a voice-controlled assistant that either doesn’t understand or can’t carry out half of what I want (as a real, flesh-and-blood concierge probably could). But when you look at the developments in Silicon Valley, you’re not exactly reassured that they’re on the right track; on the contrary, they seem rather to be working on the “problems” that exist within their own self-created bubble, which no longer has all that much in common with the reality of our lives. Here again, I am wondering, why none of the big llm companies has positioned their offer as a concierge yet.
The Most Important Thing Is the Price
But perhaps we’ve also scored an own goal by always only being on the hunt for the best deal. And “best deal” for most people is still synonymous with the lowest price. A high level of comfort on the trip hardly matters, and a larger-scale change, which would surely also cost providers a fair amount of development work, presumably isn’t worth it. Instead, the array of cluttered, garish travel portals with silly names grows larger year on year and the number of “individual top offers” rises to immeasurable heights.
Book Your Individual Top Offer Now
The interchangeable headlines across the portals always proclaim an individual top offer that is based solely on the data I’ve provided both willingly and unwillingly, and has nothing to do with any kind of individuality.
The only individual thing is probably just the price, since we can hardly know how “real” the price is that we’re paying there right now and how much it’s influenced by the data I reveal through my location, or my device, or the time, or my browsing history at the moment of booking.