sylleptic - mark hopwood’s blog

Back this weekend from a fantastic holiday, all researched and arranged using the Internet. It’s fantastic to think about how much travel has been changed by sites like TripAdvisor, and the sites produced by even small hotels are getting so good. There were only 2 bad experiences throughout the whole trip, both down to the same company, who used to be a client of mine. Can you guess who:

• Is desperate to get their customers to check in online?
• Changes booked seats (checked in online) at the departure gate, so that people who didn’t bother to check in online can be kept seated together?
• Markets exhaustively and expensively to independent travellers, to maximise their yield by cutting out agents and tour operators?
• Oversells a 747-300 by 22 seats, and has the same situation on every flight on that route for the next 3 months?
• Lies about a smaller plane having been sent (and by the way, what plane do most airlines have that is bigger than a 747-300?) so there aren’t enough seats?
• Prioritises the customers of agents and tour operators over independent travellers (who bought their tickets the day the seats came online) when deciding who gets bumped, because it can’t afford to upset their big stakeholders?

I bet anyone who’s travelled with this airline in the last 12 months can name them. The point is that online services and advertising need to be backed up and executed on in the actual business: doing it in the advertising isn’t enough.

I’m not angry, but I am flying Virgin next time!

After a great deal of effort from a cast of hundreds (well, almost) we’ve launched British Airways’ preview site for Heathrow Terminal 5, which opens next year. It’s a feast of interactive content, showing all aspects of what’s going to be an amazing place to travel through. Some of the team have had visits already, and it sounds incredibly futuristic. They say on the site that bags will often be waiting on the carousel for arriving passengers, and it’ll be the way they’ve designed and used technology to improve service that will determine how successful it turns out to be.

Well done to the team that built the site: I know it’s been hard work, though maybe not as hard as erecting the largest free-standing building in the UK…

We’ve made some great tongue-in-cheek video content to help BA with their recruitment of new cabin crew, using the Pam-Ann character. It’s pretty funny, and it’s nice to see so many clients and colleagues in the video itself.

Most importantly from my point of view, BA tend to be quite a serious brand, and it’s good to see them having some fun in this work. The site is here.

If you visit Hyderabad on Google Maps you’ll see some street maps that have been generated in a very novel way, using residents of the city, who’ve been sent satellite tracking equipment by Google. Essentially, they’re given software and a sat-nav and walk around identifying streets as they walk.

One of the problems with Google Maps, if you visit Plettenberg Bay in South Africa or Oia in Greece is that they don’t actually have any streets on them. The problem of acquiring all that street data is a tricky one, even in developed countries where they have reliable street maps. Google’s solution, using the people to map their own streets, is similar to the Open Street Map concept. Most people would probably say that if it’s on Google Maps they’ll rely on it, so there’s something very interesting here. Crowd-sourcing, as some refer to the idea of the masses creating a new product, is suddenly taking on authenticity as a source of reference material, and the only other example like this I can think of is wikipedia.

I wonder, thinking back to Tim Berners-Lee’s lecture in March, whether Google will ever try to differentiate between crowd-sourced mapping and authorised, government, mapping. There are places where mapping is very political, so the authority of a map can become very contentious.

As Brady Forrest suggests on the O’Reilly Radar blog, this open source approach to mapping is becoming a very hot topic for a lot of companies.

Travel’s on my mind at the moment, for a number of reasons. We’re planning a big trip at the end of the year, and it’s incredible how much easier it is today to research and transact online, even for some very remote and obscure locations. BUT there are still some terrible websites out there, operated by travel companies, hotels and estate agents. It’s really not excusable any more to have a bad website for your company, there are so many simple, low-cost options available to people if they look around.

On a related topic, I was at a meeting with an airline this morning, and we were introducing ourselves. I said that back before the Internet, I’d been a business analyst at Thomas  Cook, designing applications to make it easy for sales people to sell flights. It used to be an incredibly specialised skill, with training courses on the bizarre command line syntax of computerised reservation systems. To find out if there were any seats on a flight from London to Sydney on a given date would’ve been something like “ALHRSYD23JUL” and that was an easy one.

So we tried to design a system to make the work easier for all travel agents. And now we can all do it, using Expedia, or Opodo, or ba.com. And when did you last visit a travel agent?

epv0074

Originally uploaded by harkmopwood

Oia is incredibly photogenic. I’m posting a few sample photos, so you can see what I mean.

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epv0178

Originally uploaded by harkmopwood

Oia is incredibly photogenic. I’m posting a few sample photos, so you can see what I mean.

Read more »

epv0209

Originally uploaded by harkmopwood

Oia is incredibly photogenic. I’m posting a few sample photos, so you can see what I mean.

Read more »

It’s time to head off to the Sun (hopefully!) for a few days, so I don’t expect to be blogging much. I have signed up with Here or There, the latest venture from Howzat, and I’m going to try it out for photos etc, as well as using Flickr’s excellent photo blogging AP, which should drop photos I email it straight into this blog.

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If this doesn’t get you walking instead of driving, and switching lights off, and turning the heating down, nothing will.

We have to do something drastic and soon, about global warming. Well done Richard Branson, for offering $25m to the scientist who figures out how to turn CO2 back into carbon and oxygen. Details here.

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