From Jon Markman: A necessary evil. That’s how many Americans view air travel.
Very often, flying is the only way to cover long distances fast enough to do what you want to do. Like bask on a Yucatan beach for eight days instead of three.
Travelers still hate it.
Airlines know their industry brand sucks. To improve customer experiences, the biggest players are investing heavily in new technologies.
Their progress is a lesson for other industries.
It’s also important for investors. It’s underlying these stocks’ valuations.
To transform their brands, the major airlines turned to software. This move was an easy one to predict, if you’d read the famous article “Why Software Is Eating the World.” Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of Netscape, penned the op-ed article for the Aug. 20, 2011, issue of The Wall Street Journal.
That was when investors were still reeling from the effects of the worldwide financial crisis that was sparked in 2007-’08. They assumed the global economy was hopelessly impotent.
Andreessen, a software developer and venture capitalist, saw a very different future.
The billionaire – who sits on the boards of Facebook, eBay and Hewlett-Packard — saw how software was infiltrating every aspect of business. He saw the potential for new business models as well as tremendous gains in productivity.
In the airline industry, all the major carriers have come to the same conclusion. They have been implementing strategies, big and small, both to improve their bottom lines and to make travel easier … and therefore more appealing … for passengers.
For American Airlines (AAL), the focus has been on moving closer to the customer. For a while, passengers have been able to check-in with a few taps on their smartphones. This year, AAL began moving all of its consumer mobile applications to IBM’s cloud for a rework. The goal is to bring the same functionality to airport kiosks. It even hosted an internal artificial-intelligence “hackathon” to help employees learn the benefits the new software could bring to customer service.
Delta Air Lines Inc. (DAL) and United Continental Holdings Inc. (UAL) have gone even further. At the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, Delta passengers will soon be able to self-check bags using facial recognition. Software will match data collected from passport photos, then link that information to luggage. United is using chatbots. Thanks to a new Alexa skill, domestic fliers can experience a hands-free check-in via the popular Amazon voice assistant.