23.05.2024 Personal, Values

Throwback Thursday. An Anecdote from the Dawn of Online Travel

So let me use “Throwback Thursday” to tell my view of a story from the dawn of the online travel era.

Allow me to give the necessary background. Many of my friends know bits and pieces.

Getting in Touch with Aviation IT

While this is so long ago, many in our industry have forgotten that SABRE was the first computerized global network that allowed us long before the World Wide Web to go into a travel agency somewhere and book flights, later hotels and other travel services on the other side of the world. When I entered the industry back in 1987 at American Airlines, it was pioneering days still. From an airline office in Frankfurt, soon later we had the first travel agencies using SABRE, aside the predominant “START system” in Germany. Though back then, travel agents became data interface managers. Learning to hack the system using a myriad of strange codes… Anyone recalls “Remarks-Messaging”? Queues, PNR Histories or AIRIMP?

From Airline to Travel IT

It was five years later, back in 1992 that as an established expert for “CRS” I joined German Amadeus-predecessor “START” as the Subject Matter Expert (SME) for System One and Sabre. At the time, Start as an early “Windows-like tool” for the German travel industry combined multiple systems like the Lufthansa CRS inventory system (something like Sabre), German Rail, Tour Operator TUI and several other travel product providers in a single system. At that time, the launch of Amadeus was imminent and following the takeover of most Sabre staff into the new Start Amadeus company structure, suddenly that deal failed. Surprise surprise.

Together with a colleague I became responsible point of contact for airlines, managing, explaining and mitigating the “booking discrepancies” in a pre-online world, when bookings were transferred by teletype (a telex like, but automated system), not in real time. Only inside Amadeus, real time was “normal”. After some years, the internal network of which I wasn’t part of established a “Product Management Flight”, taking over my colleagues and my responsibilities… By the time I’ve become a member of the local Airline Sales Representatives Association (ASRA), though that suddenly was considered as an overstepping on my responsibilities. Something I found and find a statement of total bureaucratics’ thinking. Many years later, that was why Henna Inam’s statement resonated so well with me.

Travel Automation

In the meanwhile, I had build a global network, shared my knowledge not only with my airline sales friends, but also on CompuServe, an “online portal”, and there “GO:TRAVPRO”, a group of online travel professionals, where I met one of my mentors in my life, Richard Eastman.

So suddenly degraded from “Mr. Aviation” to “Helpdesk Executive”, I left Amadeus to start a new venture, establishing the first “GDS robotic tools” that automated recurring processes in those travel tools. GDS was the new name for Amadeus, Galileo, Sabre and Worldspan, defining themselves as “Global (Travel) Distribution Systems” and not mere (airline) Computer Reservation Systems…

I developed a tool myself that allowed Air Canada to maintain their “information pages” in the GDSs and use the same content for this new “Internet”-thingy. I gave user training to some travel agencies using “AQUA”, a software that automatically checked and improved travel agent bookings, checking for better prices, better connections, improving the response to customer needs. Then one of the moments in life happened.

Airline Sales & e-Commerce

On research for the ASRA on my second “Airline Sales & e-Commerce”-presentation, a series covering GDS, Online Services like AOL or CompuServe, but also already the new “World Wide Web” (WWW), that ran annually for some 15 years, on the WWW which I still then accessed via a then new link by CompuServe, I stumbled across a single form field on a website that called itself the “Internet Travel Network”. It was really pioneering days, the Internet being something for student freaks… The form took a Sabre-command and returned the result, usually a flight availability. Or for the smarter of us also an air fares analysis result.

I discussed this with the late Louis Arnitz, a client of mine on the AQUA-business. And questioning that using a cache system like AQUA used on existing bookings, it should be possible to process a booking “online” through a web interface. In the following year, we developed what was to become Cytric, the first tool that allowed a commercial booking to be done on the Internet. During that process, there’s an anecdote worth a Throwback Thursday…

Online Travel Booking through the Web using Amadeus

In 1996, some four or six weeks before a milestone that changed our industry, we did by mistake do test bookings in the real-world system and booked up about a hundred Lufthansa flights with travelers called Test Tester… While that was far enough in the future and we could resolve the issue with Lufthansa, we were approached by Amadeus, that it was not acceptable to abuse their system like this and they would never, never ever approve of someone doing bookings on Amadeus through a web-page!! No f***ing way! Oh yes, we were in big trouble.

Those four to six weeks later though, we signed with Siemens to implement our tool into their new “Intranet” calling it the “Siemens Travel Net… Siemens, being a top technology partner of Amadeus I must add. Oops. So once in a sudden, Amadeus was “convinced” by Siemens to allow doing bookings through a webpage. And yes, I recall their “decision” that it’s exceptionally accepted for Siemens Intranet. But don’t we dare to make something like that available to end users!!

A mere year later, there was the Amadeus Global Customer Conference in Barcelona. A close friend in Amadeus, who had helped us pulling that stunt with good ideas on my questions, asked me if I could give a quote they could use to show that they could “do Internet”, some weird development that suddenly hyped. Not that they had any API then, we had developed it all using “screen scraping”, “reading” standardized formats and specifying where the relevant information was, taking it to bits and pieces of typical machine code we then converted to human-interpretable information. So suddenly and to my great surprise, the VP of Amadeus holding the opening keynote quoted some “Juergen Barthel” of “FAO Travel” that we couldn’t have done it without Amadeus proactive help and support. Oh did we have a laugh after 😂

It’s sure noteworthy, that the tool became known as Cytric, with a spin-off known as e-Hotel, used globally and in the end acquired by … Amadeus.

Thinking outside the Box … and beyond

A friend, I came to trust, just recently called me a “visionary”, something I never call myself. When I learned the bells and whistles of “Economics” (Whole Sale & Foreign Sales), my instructor on business education was the boss of a large whole sale logistics center. He taught me to always think things through. What will be the repercussions of buying from the cheapest? Your product will loose in quality. But, he instilled that in me: There is always someone cheaper out there. And he also emphasized and taught me to leave the comfort zone of “we have always done it that way”. We must think outside the box and constantly strive to be better.

Later, I appreciated other role models and mentors, guiding me further down that road. Be it a Bob Crandall, Rita King or Colleen at American, a Hans Gesk and Jerry Kilkelly at Northwest, be it Heinz at Amadeus or Richard on GO:TRAVPRO, Louis Arnitz and Karin Froese in i:FAO, Sean and Alexandre in KDS, and so many others then and since. In turn, I survived the pandemic for being much asked as advisor. Not for day-to-day stuff, but as a crisis manager. As most of them – most people I consider friends – are simply unable to leave their boxes. Stuck in theirs.

Now, I don’t see myself a visionary. That’d be “day-dreaming”. I focus on what’s possible and how to make it happen. That’s why I’m so uncomfortable to so many, why they do call me “visionary”, but also “heretic”, “unorthodox” or “inconvenient”. “Hell Yeah!”… And don’t I let a mistake stop me from doing what’s right!

Food for Thought…

19.06.2022 Aviation, CrystalBall, Disruption Management

A-CDM, TAM, NDC and other Wishful Thinkings

This last week began with a client in North America, continued with a call from a subject matter expert in South America and culminated in two discussions I commented a bit longer on. Triggering this new article talking about “digital in aviation”, pioneering days and the impact of dinosaurs. And why we suffer in aviation from too much #talkthetalk

Not Invented Here, part 1

Last week, I had a lengthy phone call with an airport manager in the U.S. Snow-Belt, asking me about ideas, how to break up the silo thinking that keeps all his ideas about a common airport operations center as a basis for some A-CDM-style development from moving forward. Next winter approaching, he’s worried about repeating the past years’ experience of unnecessary delays. “The airline always knows better” he complained to me. If we offer them solution, it’s not theirs, so it’s being turned down. Communication is faulty and in crisis, everyone works on their own. #talkthetalk

Passengers spend 156 Minutes at AMS

Now give me a break. When I read this “promo” on LinkedIn, is it just me, seeing the fault in it?

As I outlined 2011 and 2014 in my two posts about a contemporary check-in process, contemporary airport passenger processes, to be attractive for the passenger, we need to minimize the wait time, the “ineffective” time spend at airports! It’s the big advantage of regional aviation, to minimize airport spent time.

Planning my current travels, I will spend some time with the family in Northern Germany, in between two events in Switzerland. In both cases, traveling eight hours by train will reflect in several hundred Euros in cost savings, and adds less than an hour on the total travel time door-to-door. As no, the meetings are not in Zürich.

This reminded me of the time we pioneered online travel booking (today Amadeus’ Cytric™). Own story. But as I mentioned back in 2018, compared to those pioneering days, development has almost come to a halt, with just little cosmetics and changes to the functionalities. Very little real improvements.
Working on what was to become Cytric and the first commercially used corporate online booking tool, we discussed:

The Multimodal Approach

Our vision for what was to be Cytric, that we wanted to follow, a vision not existing now, 25 years later, was to enter the home address, the destination address and the system would provide you the best travel options for you to get to the airport using car, rail, taxi, whatever, fly towards your destination and again take rail, taxi, rental car, whatever, to get to where you needed to go.

Back in those days, we already understood that it’s not about the flight. Or rail. The customer, especially the business traveler, needs to go somewhere. Getting to and from the airport, the check-in process and delays, connecting and waiting for the connecting flight, getting off the airport, all adds to the travel time. But even mighty Google only offers me to select one mode of transport, i.e. car, rail or flight… #talkthetalk

Travel Agent or Data Processor?

Speaking about Business Travel Management, we don’t need data typists any more. In the good old days, travel agents were the experts, knowing how to get the traveler from A to B, halfway (or all) around the world… Then came the GDS and the travel agents became data interfaces to the big data accessed through travel computers being connected with mighty servers. Something we call cloud computing today, using “dummy terminals”. Using codes like AN19DECFRAMIA and SS1B1M2 to search for and book a flight. Or similar complicated tools to book a rail ticket.

(And yes, that’s me in the American Airline office back in 1987 at an “ICOT” terminal.)

Then we enabled online booking and all that easy trips anyone can “book” now without any help. But what if you want to combine several destinations? What if you’re not living in Frankfurt or Paris, but in a rural, small industrial town with not many flights? We need the real travel agents again. Not the data processors. We need travel experts, that require strong and ongoing training and some specialization to provide the customer with a solution to their travel needs. That think beyond computer algorithms and understand “cross tickets” or “interlining” or multimodal travel. That take into account getting from and to the transportation hubs. And less conservatism, opposition to change and other #talkthetalk

Total Travel Time

It is why I believe we need regional aviation and we need more of it. Smaller aircraft, connecting secondary cities, offering quick and direct connection. Hubs are good for the global networks. And as I kept and keep emphasizing. Regional airports must not look out, how to get their locals out to the world. But to justify their existence, they need to bring the world to their regions! If that is by car, bus, train and/or flight is irrelevant for the passenger. To offer good connections at competitive cost and speed is the task at hand. And no, there is no reason for #flygskam if you do that right.

We need holistic thinking. Beyond our petty box. And less #talkthetalk

The “C” in A-CDM

On the call from an aviation IT professional it triggered that A-CDM is for big airports only. Is it?

Also the first article today on LinkedIn was from my friend Kalle Keller about TAM (Total Airport Management) and A-CDM.

As I outlined in my articles on that topic and i.e. the article about the Polar Vortex + Collaboration, A-CDM is about the C: Collaboration! It’s not what EuroControl, with their own agenda of this, markets as A-CDM. Neither that “bible” of theirs, they call the Airport Collaborative Decision Making (A-CDM) Implementation Manual. A “bible” about everyone I speak to reads and believes it to be the holy grail. It isn’t.

As I approached it back in 2016/17 and shared the learning curve at Passenger Terminal Expo 2017, the first step into A-CDM is and must always be a collaborative approach between the stakeholders at the airport. Systems and IT are secondary. Less than secondary! It is about tearing down siloes in the heads, between the stakeholders. The development of a common understanding of the common goal to optimize the processes for the greater good: A smooth management of airport operations beyond “the operations management”. Overall. Holistic.

And unfortunately, only once you did your homework at the airport … or the airline … the air traffic control, only then you can reach out to integrate with other A-CDM systems. And beyond. Not behind paywalls, but sharing for joint process improvements.

But then I research airports and my birth country Germany, mighty pacemaker in A-CDM, the ANSP (German Air Traffic Control) hides the basic aviation data from the Aeronautical Information Publication (AIP) is hidden behind a paywall. So other sites, like OpenStreetMaps, Wikipedia, etc. are forced to use secondary sources. Are you kidding me? And yes, even for countries with a truly open AIP, we find some 10% of discrepancies on the data. As those AIPs are published as PDF, not as data tables to quickly update. And the IATA code search is full of airports defunct for years. As they simply “add” but never check… And hide their misery behind a paywall? #talkthetalk

OTA + NDC – Barrel Bursts

An older article addressed NDC, the “New Distribution Capability” as a barrel burst. And reminded me of my project back in 2006/07, when we tried to develop a common database for hotel-information (descriptive) based on the OpenTravel Alliance XML standards that I had originally worked on in the early days. The standard has been so blown-up, that you simply can’t “comply” with a standard set of features, but anyone can pick what they want and that not being the same that others use, we have an overblown “standard” that in practical life allows everyone to be compliant, but still speaking totally different languages.

The same is with NDC. Original idea of NDC was to allow standard packaging of new or unique parts into the package. I recall early discussions when airlines started to unravel their travel packages and thought a way to package their individualized offers with new and unique ancillaries. The demand was to overcome the limitations of the smallest common denominator represented by the classic GDS. Nowadays, the GDS-ability to manage NDC is a key driver… In my opinion, the original intend was completely turned around. It’s now focused on a solution to put anything the airline comes up with in boxes that the GDS can manage.

As a bold example, we had the AIRIMP back in the 80s. To date, it is the smallest common denominator all airlines work with. Even though, a large number of functionalities specified in the AIRIMP are amiss in all those hip online (flight) booking interfaces (here’s the AIRIMP’s table of content). 26 years after we did the first commercial flight bookings on the web. Again a lot of #talkthetalk, tons of bold ideas how to make things better, whereas the basics are not yet covered? #talkthetalk

Disruption Management

A-CDM and TAM are in a large part about disruption management. Ten years ago we talked about “situational awareness” to manage disruptions. And I ask the same question ever since. I would like to see a tool that reflects the contemporary visualization of not what hits us now, but to see, how our industry-partner’s efforts impact the setbacks from weather, technical etc. – to identify hours ahead bottlenecks from aircraft delays, crews exceeding their duty hours, technical problems, peaks exceeding capacity, ATC problems, ground problems.

To do this, we must exchange data in large scale. All I see is data siloes and paywalls and a distrust to share data, keeping defunct and outdated processes alive, but no vision of collaboration on an industry scale. That even no matter that the same data is available in island solutions on interfaces like flightradar or the individual airports’ websites. #talkthetalk

The Source of the Most Common Truth

Our main problem is that our Powers-That-Be still consider themselves in a competition. Data is value, so put it in siloes. Where OpenStreetMap enabled mapping solutions, aviation data is still locked away. It takes two months until IATA publishes passenger data, after four months those numbers happen to differ substantially.

Looking at ICAO vs. the national AIP data, there are differences aplenty, worse even for IATA. So instead of working all together to manage common data together, we have different sources with different data. It is what I learned at SITA to be the art to find “The Source of the Most Common Truth”. There are industries living to develop and manage tools to overcome standard industry messages with airlines adding non-standard “features” to their messages, forcing rejects and delayed processing.

Back in 1995, Bill Gates spoke about the Internet about “Information at your Fingertips”. For the aviation, that is #talkthetalk

Status Quo + Outlook

Where aviation in the 1960s to -80s was a pacemaker in global eCommerce, it is now limping behind. Can tell stories about replies from industry bodies when I informed them about factual mistakes in their data. And their ignorance shown by neither directing the report to their PTBs, nor updating the faulty information. Instead of working together to develop the aviation of the future, we have conservative forces in play that hinder real development. Be that about A-CDM, data interfaces, data intelligence. We limp behind and instead of doing, we #talkthetalk.

Sure the same is true on sustainable aviation, but that’s another topic I discussed and discuss in other blog articles.

To overcome this, we must strengthen IATA and ICAO and demand the change from our PTBs. Stop the paywalls, speed up the availability of LIVE KPIs. Once a flight is finished the data must be available. Not tomorrow. All else is #talkthetalk.

My humble opinion. Happy to discuss how we can encourage real CHANGE.

Food for Thought
Comments welcome

22.03.2018 Aviation, IT, Management

Quo Vadis Airline & Travel Distribution

Michael Strauss of Pass Consulting, developer of an “aggregator” system for travel distribution systems addressed his thoughts on why the NDC (IATA for “New” Distribution Capability) is already “old” (it’s XML, not contemporary JSON for one) and why we still need the GDS.

I find all those developments Michael addresses to be “baby steps”. And is it 18 months already again since I questioned the very same thing? Quo Vadis OBE?

Carefully tiptoeing around, while I still wait for the first airlines to make the bold step, leave the tangle box, cut the spider webs, dust off the past and make bold moves embracing the possibilities “digital” offers us. The likes of a C.R. and R.B. Smith back when they gave birth to what eventually became CRS,, GDS, PSS. Or Louis Arnitz (and myself) making Internet-Amadeus-booking reality, when all the GDSs told us, this is impossible and tried to protect the holistic, old way. Good, GetThere launched about the same time, but when we started, all it’s infancy could was to take a Sabre-entry and return the GDS-output. But yes, that gave us the idea.

1.44 MB = 0.00144 Gigabyte or 0.00000144 Terrabyte. Those thoughts tell me how old I became…

Now we are “surprised” that Cytric bypasses the GDS-side of Amadeus, linking directly to Altea (Lufthansa direct link). I just happen to wonder if Louis Arnitz also fondly remembers that “white paper” he wrote about “Mozart” (what later became Cytric). Few people remember the evolution from “Woodside Travel Trust” (today Radius) “Hotel Disk” (3.5″ ‘floppy’) to eHotel or that eHotel has been a spin-off of what became Cytric… It just tells me, how the GDSs keep the thumb on the thinking of our self-proclaimed experts. A battle they can’t win if they don’t embrace (carefully) those changes you so nicely summarize. Working on an airline’s business plan, I just emphasized that I see the future of travel distribution with Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, Amazon. Individual like a book. Common as a book.

20 years ago (!) my friend Richard Eastman emphasized disintermediation at ITB Travel Technology congress. And that it is about packaging what the traveler wants.

Voice recognition like “Alexa, book our vacation”. GDSs? Aggregators? Airline seat? Car Rental? Hotel transfer? Restaurant? Or …

“Jürgen, this is Alexa, I believe you wanted to go to that “new movie”, they show it tonight at the cinema here in your vacation area, shall I book you two or four tickets?”
“Jürgen, this is Siri, there is a Pink Floyd revival concert in xyz, I could book you and Yulia two flight and concert tickets in four hours as well as the babysitter for the girls?”

Things I would have overseen…

Richard emphasized, the consumer does not want to bother about all those detail. They want an offer. And consume. GDS? Aggreggators? NDC? …?
Hey Richard, that was 20 years ago we discussed and envisioned those things. Ain’t it faszinating, how our industry keeps stalling…?

Food for Thought!
Comments welcome…

20.02.2017 Aviation, IT, Management

Page 1

“Our Heads Are Round so our Thoughts Can Change Direction” [Francis Picabia]

At the recent Hamburg Aviation Conference one of the speakers questioned all those airport different apps. And it reminded me of my issue about a common login process for the airport wifis. But then he questioned, that all those apps simply don’t make it to the users first screen. Initially 16, meanwhile on the larger phones more like 24 apps fighting for the attention of the user.

Then my friend Erica forwarded me that Wired-article, addressing the increasing problems the news-industry has with their advertising-driven business model. Which reminds me of those magazines I happen to read. And I simply thought, what they do wrong from my very personal point of view.

What is the advantage of Google, Facebook and those new players? If is their ability to intelligently and dynamically associate my interests and provide me with the information I am interested in. To show me that on the first page. Without omitting other possibly interesting information. Even the advertising is targeted (which requires mass). And we happen to believe that intelligence.

Until we switch to the time-line view. In Facebook with /?sk=h_chr – in LinkedIn no such URL-tweak since Microsoft took over, but if you use the browser you can hover your mouse on the … on the right above the first news, selecting “Recent Updates”. Yes, I use Google, but I understand they also mix advertising in. But…

Ow-my-gawd, but I’m German, what about my personal data and stuff?

That was another topic we discussed in Hamburg. Travelers and readers are willing to give personal information … If. It. Makes. Sense.

No, I do not want to drop my pants for a general news headline or another “case study”. And I do not like to use “real data” when someone asks me to download this nice new study they did. Have Feivel Mousekewitz on your mailing list bouncing? Good chance I’ve accessed data without seeing the need why I should add myself to a mailing list of yours. Oh yes, and I assign “custom e-Mail” to many of those and it’s wondrous who sends me advertising and how quickly on many of those “trusted business partners”!

And I do not want to get another app. Ages ago, I decided to limit myself to 10 newsletters and two or three social networks. Facebook I use mostly privately. LinkedIn for business. And LinkedIn being “difficult” both in Russia and China is an issue of concern. Google+ I dropped. I use airline apps on my travels, in fact only to get the boarding pass into my phone’s “wallet”. I used some apps for airport information, just recently learned about FLIO and try that now. But pay? Or apply profile? What’s in it for me? I like TripIt to take track of my travels, though since it was acquired by Concur and Concur by SAP it’s anything but perfect. Same as with Skype and LinkedIn since they got part of Microsoft.

But yes, it is a constant fight for space on my first smart phone screen. Or for my PC’s Windows start menu (which I customize for the sake of finding what I “need”). Yes, I’d like a single (trusted!) app to do it all.

I use phone (1), messages (2, SMS, iMessage), Facetime (3) and Viber (4, video calls), mail (5), calendar (6) and address book (7). Camera (8) and camera library (9), eBook-Reader (10), Musicplayer (11), Videoplayer (12). Maps/Navigation (13) and weather (14). Facebook (15), LinkedIn (16), browser (17). Twitter, Skype, WeChat, etc. are on the secondary page. I use Shazam (18) to identify songs I hear somewhere. Threema (19, secure messenger), Trello (20) and PayBack (21, shopping loyalty card). Amazon and IP-TV were moved to secondary pages too. A single (trusted) general news source (22). And AirVideo (23) for at home access to our video archive. My phone only has 24 spots, so the last one is used “ad hoc” as needed. For Hamburg Aviation Conference they asked to use Slack (which did not make it to my permanent apps). Routes has its own App. Where would I put “airports”? Even as a frequent traveler, I have either Wallet on the first page for travels. Or maybe FLIO. There was a time I had four or five screens. I have two left. A third if you consider the “travel” folder with all those travel apps I only need on occasion.

Want to make it to my phone? What shall I remove for the sake of your app?

So I think, the airports must ask themselves, it it truly makes sense to bet all their money on their app. Or if they should look for an aggregator, providing their information from a single app. If I travel i.e. from Berlin via London to Belfast, that I do not need three apps, but a single one. If I use the commercial lounge in London, same app. If I want to use WiFi inflight and enroute, same app. But that requires common standards. Which brings me back to Data Silos and the need of common interface standards I addressed in my last post and will address at PTE.

We need common interface standards.
We need to tear down the silos.
We need to communicate.

Food for Thought!
Comments welcome

10.10.2016 Aviation, Business Travel Management, IT

Quo Vadis OBE?

Last week, I had a discussion with one of the companies developing online (travel) booking technology, followed by an exchange with one of the techies at the TMC, the travel management companies. The latter you can still call corporate travel agency, just a new name for old (and useful) business. It triggered some memories. And questions.

Back in 1995/96, I was the GDS expert behind the development of the first corporate web-service allowing to book flights using the Amadeus GDS. Facing the “it’s impossible” from the GDSs. Using screen scraping where today’s players have the luxury of APIs. The pioneering days and I miss them. Back in those days, I had an example I use in my discussions to date talking about “change management”. The technology did not trigger much interest. The break-through was a function I fought for, which my boss and the head developer disqualified as “toy”: The seat map.

To be able to select and see “your” seat is to date one of the most used (usually the most used) optional functions travelers use when booking online. As in the example, the “default” often assigns you a seat in the rear of the cabin, while you may (as many business travelers) want to sit up front. But. To date, only very few airlines show the seat map in the process, it’s still mostly a “click here”. And none of those nice tools uses the traveler preference to pre-assign the seat intelligently following the interest of the traveler. My preference is aisle, up front. if possible the seat next to me not being used. If the flight shows full empty like the above example I travel with Yulia, I book A/C, with the kids I book A/C+D/F, so leaving the middle seat intentionally free. If the flight is full, I try the same, as far back as I can. Because if they need to sit in the middle, travelers prefer to do so up front… Logic rules in fact, but not one of the systems implemented such an auto-selection, so I keep using the seat map and keep being upset about the seat I should have swallowed from automatic assignment…

Now last weekend a post emerged about kids-free zones, just triggering the question, why those systems to date cannot manage prioritized seating. Exit rows and seats meant for baby bassinets or passengers needing extra assistance (for medical, not for financial reasons) are sold at premium charge, where they were blocked to gate assignment in the past (for good reason). Families struggle to be seated together when all the seats have been pre-reserved. Passengers arguing when they loose their early booked “nice” seats in the process, ending up on the least-preferred middle-seats. And none of the airline systems has a process in place to automatically reassign such seats in advance of the flight. So much that could be done to improve the process, but the systems, even the airlines’ own still are down to the pre-Internet management of seats on the GDS/CRS.

October 6th, easyJet promoted:

262 days. Triggering my comment “Sometimes I miss the good old days when we argued why flight bookings should be expanded from 330 to 360 days… And wondering why the “newcomers” did never invent a possibility to even “waitlist” beyond. Why not?” Because the brunt of bookings comes in short notice, it’s only a niche, flight plans change, it’s the way it is… Yeah, I know all those meak, user-ignorant reasons. And yeah, I keep asking the question. A “wait list” is no guarantee you get what you want. It’s an expression of interest, if you fly, I want to fly with you…

Another “logical question” is the user-centric implementation of the process. Discussing the issue of “virtual agents” and online support chat, one of the very early discussions I had with my friend Alex was the question to understand, when the virtual agent reached it’s limit and to redirect the discussion to a real agent… Alex is a former colleague I very much like; he was the master mind behind Virtuoz virtual agents (around 2002), speech recognition (2013), which Facebook acquired 2015 and today he’s one of the parents of Facebook M, the artificial intelligence development at Facebook.

Flight bookings are still the core of “online travel booking”, followed by hotels, travel expense, rental cars or rail. But to date, the complexity of air travel limits those tools mostly to be useful for simple bookings like A to B and back. Nevertheless, since my days (~15 years ago), the processes to request more complex flights are there. Fill out a form, the system runs a “best price” and that’s it. 15 years ago, a friend of mine being VP IT at one of the TMCs and I defined over some lunch meetings a process to split the process in such case, create the PNR with the request, the recommended flights and send it to a travel agent for a required review. Because in these cases, any experienced travel agent with their business intelligence can really “do” something, make the booking much better fitting to the need of the traveler. Today, the process exists, but split completely. All bookings go via messaging and are manually processed by a travel agent (I had that at SITA, being one of the global tech-leaders …), or book online. But that’s optimized to the existing corporate and travel agency processes, it is not user centric. 15 years after I moved on.

The only “major” changes are the integrated travel expense reporting we also started already back then and some minor improvements on the part of flexibility in the travel approval process. All else: Minor minor. Very small. In my view simply limping behind on industry developments, forced by increased differentiation, i.e. on airline’s ancillary revenues (ooops… buzz word…). Having a look at what we have today, speaking with the makers of these technologies, I’m sorry, but in my opinion, they stalled. The fun of the pioneering days is over, now changes are very, very little, incremental and it’s mostly fixating the existing processes.

What do you think?

Food for Thought
Comments welcome!

25.08.2016 Aviation, IT

Cloud vs. Security. And the Internet of Things

The Travel Industry and the Cloud

Back in 2000, in my presentation at ITB Travel Technology Congress, I addressed the changes e-Commerce brought to our distribution. Aviation and travel have a very strong history in what we today experience as “new”, call “cloud computing”.

Aviation has been a pacemaker in pre-Internet e-Commerce. Since the invention of the first “computerized reservation systems” (CRS), based on American’s ground-breaking development of the “Semi-Automated Business Research Environement” (Sabre). Read the Sabre-History for more. Thanks to the global SITA communications network (yes, those guys I temporarily worked for last year after they acquired my employer), aviation appreciated near instantaneous communication ever since I started working in aviation back in the late 80s. What we call e-Mail today, we called “Queue Messages” back then. To date, bookings, called “Passenger Name Records” (PNR) are created and maintained “in the cloud”. Whereas the “cloud based server” is either one of the Global Distribution Systems (GDS) and/or the airline’s own CRS.

Airline IT-managers celebrating this as the next big thing simply sell you old wine in new barrels. In the mid 90s, just about 20 years ago, the last “dummy terminals” were taken out of service, replaced by PCs with more sophisticated interfaces. Which were meanwhile very much replaced by web-clients working in standard browsers. The only difference being that those browsers often still use closed networks (such as SITA) for data transport instead of the Internet. Aside the obviously more reliable and stable data speed, this directly leads to the next question:

Cloud Security

Where the GDS and CRS frequently work in a closed environment reducing the danger of hacking and other insecurities, recent developments make those services available through Internet links. Being a commodity, this is much cheaper. But it also opens the communication to a number of security issues. It needs complex security layers to avoid hacking or other unintended communication disrupting those large host systems. And this is also important to understand. “working in the cloud” is “clouding” (disguising) reality with fuzzy, hip wording. All it is is communicating through the cloud (word used to disguise “the Internet”) with servers that are not local but “elsewhere”.

The cloud servers of Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Amadeus, Worldspan or Sabre. Where the “Sabre” computers have been sold to HP and Sabre uses “commercial services”, Amadeus still has it’s own and also publishes quite some diagrams and images I frequently refer to.

But a fact in all such cases: If you believe it’s your data, this is a self-deception. You got to trust the company where you store your data to be trustworthy. Whereas recently there are quite some concerns about governmental insight into data. As I mentioned back in 2008, it’s questionable if a national government demands access to data without guarantee that this confidential commercial information does not reach the company’s competitor in that country. The example was not Russian, but American. Who watches the watcher?

As I mentioned in my ITB presentation 2004, there’s possibilities to use alternate services from the Open Source developments. With cloud computing, you’re no longer required to use commercial services: I recently shifted all my personal data, especially calendar and contacts from Google into my OwnCloud. I trust my friend maintaining my own server. It’s in a huge computer center but my friend secures it against “unfriendly” or unauthorized access. And I hope what I have is not interesting to the server center operator to have someone physically accessing my server to steal data. A theoretical possibility. It’s a (semi-constant) assessment, on who to trust.

I also mentioned in my 2013 blog about Big Data, “The first, Big-Data-experts came up with, have been personal profiles, coming from a variety of different sources. That Google and Facebook still offer me young Russian ladies for marriage is a good sign that they are way off even that goal.” It’s a simple question on big data. From the same post: “And as the amount of data grows faster than the processing power, the real problem is predictable.”

Open Data

As much as you want to keep your personal and commercial data in some areas private, there was a mantra in the 90s “My data is my capital”. It was the time the Internet started to make data available to everyone and who “owned” the data could sell it expensively. To date the value of the GDS, the OAGs, Albatross, CH Aviation and other such data collecting companies. Whereas it is relatively easy to process aviation data as most of it is very clearly standardized. But as much as the data processing adds some value, it’s life cycle is ending. More and more “common data” becomes available openly. Where that i.e. started with OpenStreetMap, meanwhile the basic cadaster (land registry) data like street data, administrative boundaries, etc. are made openly available. Others still try to charge horrendous amounts, but they become a minority and will become extinct soon. The value is no longer in “owning” the data, but in meaningful analysis and use of it.

Having been pacemakers in e-Commerce, aviation today is light years behind other industries. U.S. tools showing aircraft in-flight on maps like Harris Corp. (Exelis) NextVue does not have access to Canadian data as NAV Canada wants to sell it. Expensively. Not exchange (to also have access to U.S. data). It’s mine. Such, planes not traveling to/from the U.S. airspace simply don’t show. And the NAV Canada data is very often “a problem” for webservices providing such information in other markets. Dear NAV Canada, this is your wake-up call. The same for many other government owned “businesses”. Open Data is here. If you don’t come along, you will find yourself bypassed before long.

The same experience I had in my past years working on Airport Collaborative Decision Making (A-CDM). As long as our industry does not learn that it is in the benefit to the entire business and industry to share work data at reasonable cost. Base data is freely available today. But it’s fascinating how much of the base data we get from the “official sources” (like IATA, ICAO and the likes) is of lousy quality requiring manual review and updates.

That’s aviation. Believe me, working with data from 33 countries in Europe so far, basic data like population on municipality level, associating that to commercial or openly available map data from the same country’s cadastre … It’s a challenge. Many countries where the name of a city is not unique, but a municipality may have three four different names in the country. Not to mention that there are duplicate municipality names even within the same state. Open data is needed, but I think it might be something if a country could decide on unique naming for a given municipality and if EuroStat and the national statistics offices could agree on a unique identifier. And make sure their data matches. Else, a lot of people in the world will have a full time job to repeat the stunt we did. And other such data correcting others did. Again. And again. And again again.

The Internet of Things

The last weeks the messages on LinkedIn, hyping the “Internet of Things” (IoT) are “exploding”. At this point, it’s very much like “Big Data”. Because just like big data, the concerns mentioned above apply. As long as everyone does something different and there is no common understanding about how to connect the IoT, it’s a lot of smoke and distracting noise, but not too much on real results. No matter if it’s global players announcing their understanding of IoT. As long as they don’t agree and establish open standards, IoT is a buzz word with not much substance.

As an example from another industry, more common to us all: For many years I have a look at “house IoT”. It would be so nice to be able to have the thermostats and blinds being programmable. Unfortunately, all makers of “intelligent” thermostats have their own “standard”, making it impossible to mix them. So if you want to buy, you got to select the system. And you’re stuck with it… That’s like the times of VHS vs. Betamax or DVD±R, where you usually selected the wrong technology…

Just as “video tape” or “DVD” came, evolved a standard and then became household normality, the IoT will need to develop common standards to allow common tools to exchange information with them in a default way. And not have 150 different “interpreters” trying to talk to all those devices in their language…

Food for Thought
Comments welcome!

11.08.2016 Aviation, IT, Management

Redundancy

New York Times Headline: Delta Malfunction on Land Keeps a Fleet of Planes From the Sky

Voicing that opinion in combination with the related incidents for many years, this is just another example that we rely solely on cloud technologies without proper (working) backup or fallback systems.

Talking about “system failure”, it might not be related to technology here…

No matter if it was a power failure as initially stated or a malfunction of a power control module, it shows that Delta IT did not do basic precautionary homework. No backup power, no working (tested) system redundancy at a different server location. So one server location (Atlanta) fails and down goes Delta…? I can understand if a home location fails on backup and redundancy, but no serious company should rely on a single location. Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) is a common precaution and on distributed systems can also operate at geographically different locations in order to assure that during an outage at one location, the other location seamlessly takes over.

The secondary system may be slower, less responsive, but it provides the backup.

And Delta cannot claim that to be the first time. The first time I had a similar case was with Northwest (now Delta) back in early 1990, where Northwest was one of the only flights leaving Frankfurt on time during a system outage, as we issued boarding passes by hand, based on the passenger list printed the evening before… I think that was the last time no individually traveling passenger had to sit on the middle seat alone…

Another example I keep referring to was the time in the later 90s, early 2000s during the infancy of online travel booking, when Lufthansa hat to shut down Expedia. As Expedia inquiries for flight availability paralyzed Lufthansa operations. Because from the old logic of the airline CRS (computer logic), the booking process prioritized operational processes. Expedia’s uncached availability requests to the Lufthansa hosts flooded the Lufthansa system to the point where no operational requests could be processed. Good night check-in, good night passenger manifests, good night operations.

In 2004, a system crash paralyzed Lufthansa, which I addressed in my blog about the St. Florian’s Principle: Oh Holy Dear St. Florian, don’t burn my house, take the neighbor’s one.

Those are just major ones, which became noticeable to me. Business Insider reports more cases with JetBlue, American and United. So now it’s Delta. But taken the speed of IT development and the increasing complexity of the systems used, I doubt it takes a long time to hear about more such crashes. Time for the airline IT to do it’s homework and make sure the host system (CRS) is redundant…

Food For Thought
Comments welcome

14.04.2012 Aviation, Values

Ethics in Tourism

There is quite a discussion in Germany these days about Tourisms and Ethics, ever since German politician (Klaus Brähmig of Merkel’s governing party CDU) called for a boycott of travel to Egypt and other “non-democratic” countries. It also comes up on Lufthansa’s latest move to not charge a “service fee” on their website.

All in all, I am being questioned by many friends about topics, that make me wonder, how you could call Germany “social market economy” and not what it is: Capitalism! But that is not just in Germany, we talk about a global trend. If you believe in Capitalism, the world is good. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer and the middle class erodes one way or the other (likely “the other”).

There was this video in 2006, I referred to ever so often: Shift Happens Narrated. I did not yet find a good update with 2011 figures, but believe it, it get’s worse.

Is capitalism the right answer? Everything that makes money is good? Do we learn from Exxon Valdez, Deep Water Horizon or the recent gas leakage in the North Sea? Obviously not.

Recent reports claim that the international hydra Monsanto intentionally spreaded gene-manipulated (GM) corn crops in Mexico – against the law and in attempted secrecy. This way, they try to get a hold on Mexican farmers, who will in return be charged the “license” fees for using GM corn of Monsanto origin! There is no way, the corn could have reached the fields in a natural way, where it was found. Is everything allowed if it brings money?

Lately (2010), a strong movement forced a political acknowledgement to the Human Right to Water! Do you see the little blue planet picture? But people starve to death, simply missing access to clear water! The consumption of bottled water in Germany exploded from 12.5 l in 1970 to about 130 l in 2006! Did you know that multinationals pump water in areas where the local people face a dry period? This happened even in Michigan, USA – it is not limited to third world countries. That is anti-social, unethical and simple capitalism of the worse kind.

And despite the growth of Solar Power and other alternative energy possibilities, our governments build atomic power plants where we don’t know how to get rid of the waste products, they support building of dirty coal power plants, emitting more Carbon-Dioxide than thousands of old cars could, simply dancing to the whistles of the energy lobbies. They let Greece go into a major crisis, simply to give the banks time, to move their foul papers to the state. Don’t believe it? There is extensive German coverage on Monitor, a bi-weekly report by public television channel ARD in it’s dossiers.

All that said… What about the travel industry?

Many years ago, there was a question about the difference of a Tourist to a Terrorist. With tourists, there are no bombs involved, but the results are even more devastating… Yes, this is exaggerating. But thousands of divers ruin the coral reefs around the world. Thousands of tourists skiing the alps (or Rocky Mountains) have a devastating effect to that natural preserve. Aircraft exhausts are in high altitude, having a worse effect than ground time. But even back in 2007/08, when I was involved in the feasibility study for a WIG, all development I hear about is “less kerosene”, bio-fuels replacing kerosene (with unknown new side-effects), but that project stalled with the world financial crisis and seems to be of a low priority. Coutries like the Maldives could replace their entire local aircraft fleet and replace by a clean alternative.

I hear a lot about the “reduced noice levels” of aircraft, but in the discussion about the night flight ban in Frankfurt, I asked publicly, where there are hard facts about this? How did the noise levels reduce and why are the airports then paying new millions every year in counter-noise-modifications in their neighborhood?

Many meetings could be replaced by professional video conferencing, but our managers keep the “need” to meet for their routine meetings “in person”. Trains focus on high speed route networks in competition to air (and that makes sense), at the same time neglecting the local traffic – how to commute from a small township to the bigger town for work?

Yes, I love aviation, I am an airliner by vocation. But yes, I have a soul and yes, I question the tendency to keep status quos without need. The feasibility study provided figures that such a solution would pay off within maximum three years, then it’s a cash cow. It could revive the old harbor cities (the ones on the seaside). But such revolutionary developments are opposed by the “old school”, all the investment going into the airport infrastructure.

Responsibility begins with each and everyone of us. We are supposed to be Christian’s, but Christian behavior would call for social behavior and I cannot see such. The question is: Where will we be in 100 years? Watch the “Shift Happens” video again:

Name this country

Richest in the World. Largest military. Center of world business and finance. Strongest education system. World center of innovation and invention. Currency the world standard of value. Highest standard of living.

… England … In 1900!

How did travel develop in the past 100 years. People traveled by ships, horse carriage and some railroad systems. Just a 100 years ago, Titanic sunk. Today it takes less than six hours to travel from Frankfurt to Boston. In the 60’s, American Airlines and IBM invented Sabre and revolutionized the distribution of airline seats. I was with American, when they started to provide Sabre terminals to the first travel agencies in Germany – which have already gained experience with the START-system, accessing the Lufthansa “Res”-system through a pre-windows environment! In 1996, as the “GDS Coordinator” I was primary element for the development of the first Internet Booking Engine for business travel (air, hotel, car). We had “e-Mail” (called “SITA-Telex”) in the late 80’s, no one spoke about “Internet” then. But I also introduced the “Internet” and the new “World Wide Web” to the Airline Sales Representatives Association back in 1994, recommending i.e. Continental Airlines to register their domain name for a few bucks quickly. They sure ignored my recommendation and for years used “www.flycontinental.com” instead.

Is that “you”?

What is our business? Is it to manage a GDS? Many travel agents (seem to) believe so. Then we are database operators. AN20MAYFRAHKT18 – that is a database request. Is your business to issue tickets? Then you are no longer needed, as eTicket is the new standard.

What was “your business” 100 years ago? It was not to book the air ticket and the hotel. It was a complete consulting, how to get Grammy from her home in Middlesex to Aunt Cathy, who emigrated with her husband to this new colony Swaziland in the South of Africa. Could she use some of the new airplane-routes? Where could she use trains? Where were carriage routes? What vaccinations would she need, where would she stay overnight, what could she do on the multi-day-stops en-route?
Or you booked the summer seaside. If you lived in England, you were lucky, you could book one of the “packages” offered by some “Thomas Cook”. Else, you had to read a lot about the “common” spas, recommend and explain you client the advantages, book the trip, the hotel, the treatments.

And yes, it was expected from you to be knowledgeable about the countries, their political, cultural, economical and social systems. If you traveled to an Islamic country, what are the rules? Why to be careful and patient about cows in India. And to know that India was British colony. Sometimes I wonder, how many of the people selling “Seidenstraße” ever learned some detail about Marco Polo. Venice, Genoa have been the center of the world those days – the “seafaring nations”. Frankfurt, London, Atlanta, Peking are the centers today – of the “airfaring” world. What are “nations” in a globalizing world? But U.N. is a toothless tiger. Lybia, Tunesia and Egypt were (as Kuwait) some years ago immediately targets of military – for the sake of crude oil. But in Syria thousands are slaughtered, but they are not a capitalist necessity, so the world looks and doesn’t do.

An old saying says: Don’t talk about ethics to a hungry man!

Ethics begins with myself. Do I fly or drive – or do I take a train? Is the trip necessary? Can I achieve the same outcome with a video-conference and e-Mail? It is also about: Is this to the best of my employer – or do I justify the trip, simply because I want to see someone – or get somewhere. And it is about: Can I help to make this world a better place?

Yes, companies are about making money. But if only money rules, we adore the Golden Calf again. How un-Christian can we get? Talk to me about Ethics in Tourism. Yes, we got to survive. But at all cost?

The travel industry prospers, but for some reason, the employees do not participate. It’s all about money. Is it?

Food For Thought

And as usual, your comments – private or in the blog – are appreciated…