Originally Posted by
Danash
Hardly a valid exercise in price comparison - how about Dub- LHR on a Friday ?
OK!!!
Originally Posted by
Danash
My point was that the airlines use the apps to keep their customers in one area - and so 'own' the customer. It is a well accepted principle that keeping your App users in one app for all experiences enhances their brand experience and allows you to sell them more stuff while keeping them 'app happy'.
Well, in your bag example, I don't really see that anyone else can "own" the issue.
The potential "cost" of losing a customer who had to wait 30 minutes to report a lost bag is probably one that they are willing to take. And I think the customer service issue is more related to losing the bag in the first place, rather than the "ease" of reporting it.
I'd prefer an airline that gets the behind-the-scenes stuff right and doesn't lose a bag in the first place, rather than one that "streamlines" the process of reporting a bag. (When you get your worldtracer reference, you can always update your record to record new delivery addresses, so the ability to do so in an app is a marginal improvement at most)
Originally Posted by
Danash
It doesn't take a lot of investment to do that ( I build apps for a living ) with the amount of data sharing tools there are today. The relative scale of the airlines is not relevant - the customer service ethic is however.
Just my 2p.
I don't deny that - but it's about more than just building the app and the cost of developing the app. There needs to be all manner of back end stuff that can interface and talk to the app. EI is (I think) pretty notorious for having ancient IT (one of the reasons why oneworld re-integration was delayed, and may never happen) so the "small investment" may turn out to be quite a large investment after all.
Probably one they will eventually have to make, but I wouldn't hold my breath!
I can think of IT improvements that would potentially be more useful - the ability to look up third party bookings - such as bookings made using Aer Club (!) and select seats, etc.