Simpliflying has taken a look at what airlines are doing with Google Plus and came up with the following findings:

• There are now 70 airlines with brand pages on Google Plus.
• The vast majority of the pages are in English – about 78.5%. But on average, pages in Spanish are “liked” more often.
• The airline with the highest number of “likes” (known as “+1″s) was Mexican low cost carrier Volaris with almost 3000, double that of the second most popular page.
• The most common type of content on Google Plus pages is brand-related (as opposed to sales related on Facebook or customer service related on Twitter).

Opinion is still pretty divided as to the overall value of Google Plus, compared to rival platform Facebook, but certainly those that have managed to harness some kind of value from it are seeing some results.

Matt Rhodes, strategy director at UK-based agency Fresh Networks, for example, believes Google Plus has the ability to change search in fundamental ways over time and the data which Google is capturing and re-serving through its other, connected platforms is becoming a critical element of the social graph which, inevitably, brands will need to understand and utilise better.

Early days, early days.

Anyway, here is an infographic from the Simpliflying team to showcase the results:

Fifteen years ago, when I worked in a large TMC, one of the sales agents rushed to claim his prize for outselling every other agent in the UK: return flights, first class, London to Sydney.

The thing is, the agent was earning mostly commission and couldn’t really afford a holiday. Taking three days off work, he flew to Sydney, spent long enough in the airport to buy souvenirs and some coffee, and flew straight home again.

Airlines sometimes act as if that guy were representative of their customers as a whole!

When it comes to selling anything beyond the flight ticket, airlines fall broadly into two camps – the white label versus the travel retailer.

Battle lines drawn

In the white label camp are those airlines that are unwilling to take what they see as a business risk of understanding and managing any products other than flights.

They don’t know hotels or car rental, and they let someone else sell them. They are essentially selling advertising space or renting out part of their shop front or brand. The white label travel providers step in, happy to take the bulk of the sales margin, own the customer engagement, and have the revenue up front.

The airline industry is never dull, and management has to focus on fuel prices, route network, mergers, labour negotiations, and so on.

Part of the attraction of the white label model is the belief that there’s nothing to do except embed some contextual links in the selling flow or the confirmation page and the commission cheques start to arrive.

The other camp, those airlines who try to be travel retailers, see it differently. They see the real value of their website in terms of complete customer engagement and the potential for the airline to take a bigger share of the travel spend.

They will use aggregators to give them access to a broad range of products – hundreds of car suppliers, tens of thousands of hotels – but will also manage some products themselves.

• They will marshal or create content for key destinations.
• They will directly contract some suppliers.
• They will talk to some hotel properties directly.
• They will decide which non-air products are complementary to their brand – what they want to sell.
• They will try to own the entire customer booking process, giving them true merchandising capabilities – a travel shopping cart, in-line cross sell, and the opportunity to personalise, creating a differentiated user experience.
• Commercially, they will try to become the merchant for some or all of the non-air products.
• They may try to grow this business in-house, or they may have a holiday subsidiary already.

If you aren’t in the travel retailer camp already and you don’t have a holiday subsidiary, it can seem like a daunting task. It is not just an IT project, to realise any significant benefit there will be changes to the business.

The good news for you as an airline is that there is a middle ground between handing the customer away or trying to do it all yourself.

Using the right technology, it is possible for your airline.com website to transition from white label to retailer, stopping at any point where the risk / reward balance is right for you, and the customer experience is right for your passengers.

Rather than taking an all or nothing approach to selling the high revenue ancillary products, consider some of the activities that could be done in a more gradual way, or even partially outsourced.

Hotel contracting is something you can grow into, so here are two steps to think about:

• Start with one content feed and one API to a hotel aggregator and you can get up and running with hundreds of thousands of properties – initially no different from the white label camp. Gradually you could start to contract hotels in your key destinations, or home market for in-bound. You can go from having the same 100,000 hotels as everyone else, but also 1 or 2 hotels at rates that no one else has. You can do this in-house (one FTE can contract 30+ properties per season) or outsource the contracting piece, as long as you ensure rates can be loaded that are unique to your channel.

• Consider being the merchant for the entire shopping cart and earning all of the revenue up front. You may want to act as merchant in some countries but not others or you may want to act as merchant for some products but not others. You have to consider bonding and duty of care and how it varies from market to market. Find partners that will allow you to operate different models in different markets but pick a business partner and technology platform that leaves you in control of the product, the experience, the consumer data and the payment model.

Finally when it comes to paying the suppliers, reconciliation is also something that can also be outsourced. Avoid the “special” airline back office system built in 1978, or having your retailing strategy derailed by a three-year ERP project.

What you need is effective accounts payable and financial reporting, and that is something you can buy.

Travel retail technology and business process outsourcing providers now exist to allow airlines to retail the full travel experience without the need to build or buy a large scale tour operator business.

If it still feels daunting, consider what the first step would be: If there was one thing you could change about your white label solution to provide a better product offer to your passengers or a better commercial model to yourself, what would it be?

NB: This is a guest article by Mark Lenahan, vice president of product strategy at OpenJaw Technologies.

NB2: Airline and suitcase image via Shutterstock.

Then ask yourself these questions:

• Are high volumes of supplier booking payments creating an accounting nightmare for your payments teams?
• Are you sacrificing control, or having difficulty managing to contracted rates with your supplier base?
• Do you spend too much time resolving payment disputes?

If so, our panel of payments experts in travel booking will help you tackle this problem in a different way.

In this webinar, payment experts from Wright Express, Expedia and HotelTonight will discuss how single-use virtual accounts can help drive efficiencies in the payment and settlement process.

You will hear tips – and potential traps to avoid – when evaluating the landscape of electronic payment solutions for travel booking.

Our webinar panelists are:

• Jim Pratt, Wright Express, VP, corporate payment solutions
• Chris Richter, Expedia, Senior Project Manager, financial operations
• Jared Simon, HotelTonight, chief operating officer
• Marc DeVallette, Wright Express, product manager

Moderator:

• Kevin, Tnooz, co-founder and editor

Attendees will be able to interact live throughout the event using the webinar’s chat facilities.

This FREE 60-minute webinar takes place on Thursday 23 February 2012 at 11am US/4pm UK/5pm Central Europe (all times local).

You can reserve your FREE seat at this webinar HERE.

The webinar is powered by GoToMeeting. System requirements: Windows7, Vista, XP or 2003 (PC users) or Mac OS X 10.4.11 Tiger or newer (Mac users).

We will record the webinar and publish on Tnooz following the event for those who cannot attend live.

Space is limited. Register for FREE now!

NB: Credit card image via Shutterstock.

Air France piled on an additional 4.5% market share to its previous tally, moving it within 1% of EasyJet which had a more modest gain of 1%.

But with the dot-com Air France site combined, the carrier is now ahead of EasyJet in the rankings.

Most popular travel websites in France for the week ending January 28 2012:

Agencies

Rank	Website	Domain	Percentage of Visits	Previous Position
1	Voyages-sncf.com	www.voyages-sncf.com	13.81%	1
2	EasyVoyage.com	www.easyvoyage.com	8.80%	2
3	Promovacances.com	www.promovacances.com	7.20%	3
4	Voyage Priv‚	www.voyage-prive.com	4.34%	4
5	eDreams France	www.edreams.fr	4.14%	5
6	Jetcost.com	www.jetcost.com	3.20%	7
7	opodo France - Billet d'avion	billetavion.opodo.fr	2.84%	6
8	Look Voyages	www.look-voyages.fr	2.73%	8
9	www.vol24.fr	www.vol24.fr	2.68%	-
10	GoVoyages.com	www.govoyages.com	2.66%	10

Destinations and Accommodation

Rank	Website	Domain	Percentage of Visits	Previous Position
1	ViaMichelin France	www.viamichelin.fr	13.54%	1
2	Booking.com	www.booking.com	6.47%	3
3	EasyVoyage.com	www.easyvoyage.com	6.25%	2
4	TripAdvisor France	www.tripadvisor.fr	4.20%	4
5	Abritel	www.abritel.fr	3.31%	5
6	Routard.com	www.routard.com	2.47%	6
7	Gralon	www.gralon.net	2.24%	8
8	L'Officiel des vacances	www.officiel-des-vacances.com	2.23%	7
9	Homelidays.com	www.homelidays.com	2.12%	10
10	Communes.com	www.communes.com	1.48%	-

Airlines

Rank	Websites	Domain	Visits Share	Previous Position
1	easyJet.com	www.easyjet.com	25.17%	1
2	Air France - France	www.airfrance.fr	24.02%	2
3	Ryanair	www.ryanair.com	12.87%	3
4	Corsairfly	www.corsairfly.com	3.50%	4
5	KLM Royal Dutch Airlines	www.klm.com	3.01%	5
6	Lufthansa	www.lufthansa.com	2.25%	-
7	Air France	www.airfrance.com	2.20%	7
8	Vueling Airlines	www.vueling.com	2.19%	8
9	Royal Air Maroc	www.royalairmaroc.com	1.74%	-
10	Emirates	www.emirates.com	1.60%	10

NB: Data courtesy of Experian Hitwise

NB2: Image via Shutterstock.

The UK’s RNIB says it has decided to take legal action against BMIBaby this week (papers filed at the Central London County Court) after the airline failed to make “vital changes” to its website to allow some customers to use online services.

Currently, the RNIB claims, partially sighted or blind visitors to the site are “forced to search for flights or make bookings via a call centre”.

Concerns were initially raised with BMIBaby in 2010 after customers complained to the RNIB about the airline site.

The legal action is the “last straw” in order to force the changes required, an RNIB official says – a process the organisation has never put in place before with any other consumer website.

RNIB campaigns officer for inclusive society, Hugh Huddy, says blind and partially sighted customers “deserve to have access to the best online prices and flight information, just as any customer of BMIBaby does”.

“Why should those with sight loss risk missing out on a web-only deal or be forced to ring a call centre simply because companies are failing to take accessibility standards seriously?”

Responding to the legal action, BMIBaby says it commissioned a report by the RNIB and received recommendations only in November last year.

A BMIBaby official says:

“We have a project team in place to action the recommendations which requires the bespoke development of bmibaby’s website technology.

“This inevitably takes a period of time to develop but in the meantime we have a new local rate telephone number for people to call to speak to our call centre to obtain our discounted website fares.

In the meantime, BMIBaby says it has now added a dedicated accessibility page to the site in order to keep customers up to date with its progress.

The case will be welcomed by campaigners, as some argue that the area of accessibility has fallen down the agenda in recent years as sites have become more interactive.

The globally recognised standard practice for web design and user experience in this area has been driven by guidelines put forward by the Web Accessibility Initiative.

NB: Hat-tip – Hayden Sutherland.

Most recent statement from Amadeus:

“Minimising such incidents and their impact on our customers is very important to Amadeus.

“During the incident, our priority was to return to normal service as quickly as possible; once it closed we focused on identifying the cause and analysing actions we could take to avoid reoccurrence. The cause of the problem appears to be a network component.

“We are continuing to investigate this in detail. Once again, we regret the inconvenience this incident may have caused.”

ORIGINAL:

The extent of a significant technology failure at Amadeus yesterday is beginning to unravel, as other systems across the industry are now known to have been affected.

Amadeus is remaining tight-lipped as to what triggered such a major collapse, when an outage which lasted a number of hours managed to hit passenger self check-in and reservation systems, agency bookings as well as airport counter systems.

A post on the Amadeus blog this morning said the incident had been fully resolved, with an apology for the inconvenience. Officials will not disclose the nature and size of the outage.

It is understood that although Amadeus customers were hit by the problems, other GDSs were also impacted as the Amadeus airline IT system ALTEA was involved.

ALTEA currently powers over 100 airlines around the world, including British Airways, Qantas, Iberia and Cathay Pacific.

Although it is an Amadeus-run platform, agencies on other distribution networks such as Sabre and Travelport which were trying to connect to some of the airlines involved were also unable to carry out fare queries or make bookings.

A number of insiders across the GDSs have confirmed that the outage was far bigger than initially thought given that the ALTEA system effectively controls how agencies on other networks connect to airline reservation systems.

NB: Image via Shutterstock.

The outage lasted a number of hours and hit passenger self check-in and reservation systems, agency bookings as well as airport counter systems.

Reports say British Airways, Qantas, Iberia and Cathay Pacific are among the airlines hit by the system failure.

In short: it could be the double whammy of a distribution service and airline IT collapse.

At around 2000 CET (1300 EST), Amadeus released a statement to confirm that all airline systems are restored.

“Some travel agency customers may continue to experience service disruption which we are investigating. We regret any inconvenience this may have caused.”

Amadeus says a detailed explanation as to what happened and which airlines were affected will be released in due course.

The problem is the second in as many months for Amadeus, after seeing Qantas hit by a major outage in December when passengers were unable to check-in with the airline for a number of hours in December last year.

More to follow…

NB: Image via Shutterstock.

So with that tension in mind, and as luck would have it during a trip to a conference this year in Holland, Tnooz found the perfect image to demonstrate both points of view.

In October the Hotel Casa 400 in Amsterdam posted signs above every urinal in the male toilets, each with a QR code which would direct, err, users to a page on the property’s website.

One the one hand the use of codes in the toilets shows some degree of imagination – capture guests during seemingly idle moments, let them know about various services the hotel offers.

But surely there are practical considerations here, right? Or is there some QR Code etiquette?

Presumably users are expected to snap the code with their smartphones while they use the toilet, or, more hygienically, do they come back after washing their hands, politely asking the person now perhaps occupying the area to step aside for a moment?

Jokes aside, such a scenario illustrates why some consider QR Codes to be nothing short of an annoyance and waste of time.

Neverthless, QR Codes do appear to be popular with marketers, attempting to capture the apparent zeitgeist before the next gizmo comes along.

Indeed, Tnooz has heard of at least one European tour operator which placed a QR Code within a press display ad and saw “significant levels of activity” as a result.

Here is an infographic which illustrates some of the key datapoints from QR Codes, in terms of how they are used.

It appears for the time being that QR Codes will survive (or, at least, not find themselves flushed down the toilet just yet), but realistically they will only last until something better comes along.

But with the speed in which smartphone cameras and Near Field Communications are developing, QR Coders haters will probably not have to wait too long… just a few more trips to the gents.

Third placed American added 1% market share to its previous showing as Delta lost 0.25%.

JetBlue also shed 0.5% market share over the same period.

Most popular travel websites in the US for the week ending December 24 2011:

Agency

Rank	Website	Domain	Percentage of Visits	Previous Position
1	Expedia	www.expedia.com	12.07%	1
2	priceline.com	www.priceline.com	9.33%	2
3	Orbitz	www.orbitz.com	6.79%	3
4	Yahoo! Travel	travel.yahoo.com	6.00%	5
5	CheapOair	www.cheapoair.com	5.92%	4
6	Bing Travel	www.bing.com/travel	5.83%	-
7	Travelocity	www.travelocity.com	5.73%	6
8	Kayak	www.kayak.com	4.84%	7
9	Hotwire	www.hotwire.com	4.52%	8
10	Cheap Tickets	www.cheaptickets.com	2.67%	9

Destinations and Accommodation

Rank	Website	Domain	Percentage of Visits	Previous Position
1	TripAdvisor	www.tripadvisor.com	7.86%	1
2	Southwest Airlines Travel Guide	travel.southwest.com	2.73%	6
3	Marriott International	www.marriott.com	2.68%	2
4	Hotels.com	www.hotels.com	2.59%	3
5	InterContinental Hotels Group	www.ichotelsgroup.com	2.33%	5
6	Hilton Hotels Online	www.hilton.com	2.06%	4
7	Booking.com	www.booking.com	1.69%	7
8	Carnival Cruise Lines	www.carnival.com	1.53%	8
9	Walt Disney World	disneyworld.disney.go.com	1.37%	10
10	Vacation Rentals by Owner	www.vrbo.com	1.28%	9

Airlines

Rank	Website	Domain	Percentage of Visits	Previous Position
1	Southwest Airlines	www.southwest.com	24.03%	1
2	Delta Air Lines	www.delta.com	12.82%	2
3	American Airlines	www.aa.com	10.20%	3
4	JetBlue Airways	www.jetblue.com	6.81%	4
5	Continental Airlines	www.continental.com	6.48%	5
6	US Airways	www.usairways.com	5.54%	6
7	United Airlines	www.united.com	5.42%	7
8	AirTran Airways	www.airtran.com	4.33%	8
9	Allegiant Air	www.allegiantair.com	3.09%	-
10	Spirit Airlines	www.spiritair.com	3.05%	9

Travel search terms

Rank	Search Term	Percentage of Clicks	Percentage Paid	Percentage Organic	Previous Position
1	mapquest	4.66%	0.39%	99.61%	1
2	google maps	1.64%	2.56%	97.44%	2
3	southwest airlines	1.28%	32.99%	67.01%	3
4	maps	0.87%	0.98%	99.02%	4
5	map quest	0.67%	1.77%	98.23%	5
6	google earth	0.62%	21.22%	78.78%	8
7	travelocity	0.58%	60.88%	39.12%	7
8	expedia	0.57%	57.46%	42.54%	6
9	continental airlines	0.54%	8.27%	91.73%	9
10	american airlines	0.52%	3.79%	94.21%	-

NB: Data couresy of Experian Hitwise

This time the video is official, unlike the earlier effort which was made to look like a passenger clip but had the fingerprints of PR all over it.

It shows a Cebu crew performing the in-flight safety procedures to “All I Want for Christmas is You.”

Half a million views on YouTube in less than ten days, but is a far cry from the five million in five days from the Lady Gaga-soundtracked performance from October 2010.

Meanwhile, over in Silicon Valley, startup investment firm First Round Capital also issued its annual Christmas video, enrolling a string of companies in its portfolio to, ahem, sing Rebecca Black‘s Friday (yeah, who?).

If you can make it to 1m20s, look out for HotelTonight‘s Sam Shank strutting his stuff.

He’ll look back on this in years to come with fondness, no doubt.

• Those with grand ideas and execution to match
• Those with the ideas but where execution is not quite there
• Those who you wonder what they were smoking when they thought that idea was going to work.

The fourth category is the one that goes unnoticed

• The humble new business selling just a little bit better than their nearest competitors, but not setting the world on fire.

I feel for those entrepreneurs chasing the big dream with the hope of being backed by venture capital money.

VCs tempt entrepreneurs into the ultimate land-grab based on a new idea. This is generally in the hope that a new area has value that can be realised at a later date, rather than backing new businesses in existing sectors where VC level returns are harder to achieve, but perfectly good job-creating businesses can be created.

The incumbents may have left a few angel funding-sized holes in the big cheese of the travel industry – but $100 million plus valuation holes -where VCs can play – no – those holes are rare (or quickly closed by incumbents once they hear about a new startup with a great idea in their area).

So when someone comes to Tnooz and says “we are going to do this and it is going to be game changing” what are we meant to do?

For example, look at TripFab, which uses “The travel industry is going to crap its pants” as its tag line.

Now are we meant to say “thank goodness, this is what we have been waiting for and therefore they should lead the Tnooz news with every single functionality tweak they make”, or are we meant to double check that our subscription to our laundry service is up to date.

Shooting for the moon doesn’t mean you will reach the stars. Using this approach as a startup in the travel industry may mean you never leave the launch pad.

Then you also hear about the airline KLM, which has announced its intention to launch a social seating service. Passengers will be able to link their social media profile to their check-in information, and subsequently choose a seating partner based on the social media profiles of other passengers.

Now there is an intention/aspiration. But why should this intention be given any more likelihood of reality than a startup’s publicly stated aspiration?

Of course, being an incumbent and large scale supplier makes their statement more interesting – but what if KLM is just moving to using the Ryanair school of PR and announcing all sorts or ideas or nonsense for publicity’s sake (such as paying to pee on a plane – did that ever happen?) [NB: Ed - No, it did not]

For those who dream of being the next big thing in travel, the vast majority will fail to do so. But without that mindset, the confidence and the determination to succeed, you will fail, for sure.

So perhaps making big, aspirational, future-looking statements is simply the key that gets you entry to the top club – but it doesn’t make them succeed in their own right.

Perhaps we should learn to accept and love these statements as an outward sign of the dedication required to deliver on the dream. Doesn’t mean we should cover them on Tnooz though.

Here is to 2012, where Tnooz becomes more widely read than The New York Times. It’s an aspiration, right?

NB: Image via Shutterstock.

Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?

The BSFG Travel Network is a network of travel sites providing niche vacation and adventure booking. Our network also gives users a daily dose of sports, entertainment and advice content relevant to their place in life.

BabyShowerForGuys is the leadoff hitter in the BSFG Travel Network. BabyShowerForGuys will approach the online travel industry with the creation of a brand new holiday for expecting fathers—a baby shower for guys.

Plenty of couples take a babymoon when they are expecting their first child. But considering all of the anxiety and uncertainty that comes with becoming a new father, men really need a chance to let loose before they become slaves to the diaper bag.

Six years ago marked my first Baby Shower For Guys, and I’ve helped coordinate one with my friends every year since. BabyShowerForGuys caters to men around the country looking for travel options targeted specifically at their place in life.

BSFG Travel Network includes two founders, myself as CEO and chief creative officer Eric Winters. I bring a background in sales and building corporate infrastructure; my most recent position was as National Sales Manager at HaloSource.

Eric has designed all of the visual and creative elements that make BabyShowerForGuys what it is. Jay Lee joined the company as a third partner and CTO, responsible for the backend technology driving the site.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

BSFG Travel Network is currently bootstrapped, supported by a round of friends and family investments. We are seeking angel investing in the coming months.

What problem are you trying to solve?

Customer loyalty. With the launch of BabyShowerForGuys, and subsequent sites targeted at other specific demographic groups, BSFG Travel will disrupt the online travel space by providing travel booking combined with editorial content targeted at very specific consumer segments.

We plan to roll out destinations aimed at women, couples and more.

Describe the business, core products and services?

BabyShowerForGuys will provide users with hundreds of destinations, hotels, airfares, adventure travel, packages, and events all available for convenient booking.

The site will feature community pages where men can get information about the best bars, sporting events and activities that will help make their getaway memorable. It also features content to help men plan their trip and help get the women in their lives on board with the idea of a Baby Shower For Guys.

Additionally, articles written for a male audience that cover pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, relationships and parenting are lacking online, forcing expectant fathers to visit sites that are aimed at women in order to educate themselves on these topics.

BabyShowerForGuys is launching with a content-rich site that will provide our users with advice, entertainment and sports articles relevant to their place in life.

The site will also include apparel sales to further reinforce the growing popularity of rewarding expectant fathers with a guys-only getaway to celebrate their entrance into parenthood.

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

BabyShowerForGuys is primarily targeting men ages 21-40 years, focusing on fathers and expectant fathers, with elements of the site also geared toward the women in their lives. Our next site will be aimed at expectant mothers and their friends.

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

We conducted in-person focused discussion groups ranging from 5-15 males and females within our 21-40 years age target in Washington, California, Nevada, Arkansas, New York and Florida.

This feedback helped us to further hone our plans for the launch and ensure that our product/site would offer the best possible experience for our target users.

What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?

We have three revenue streams, and this will be the model for all of our sites: travel booking (same model as traditional online travel agencies), advertising and merchandise sales.

Because BabyShowerForGuys is introducing a new holiday for men (a Baby Shower For Guys), we believe our brand is very strong and will resonate with consumers.

Thus, branded apparel, cigars and other products will appeal to our audience as yet another way to celebrate the expectant father.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Strength:

• Completely new approach to online travel, solving the customer loyalty problem that has long plagued the industry.

Weakness:

• We’re a new player to a crowded space.

Opportunities:

• travel is arguably the largest industry in the world yet most online travel agents are using similar approaches to acquire and maintain customers. It’s time for a company to take a more personal approach when it comes to its customers. We’re combining this with the rapidly growing trend around mancations.

Threats:

• Big competitors that have the lion’s share of the market.

Who advised you your idea isn’t going to be successful and why didn’t you listen to them?

We have been reminded by more than one potential investor that we are operating in a crowded space littered with dead bodies.

Sparring with online travel agencies who can do whatever they want whenever they want is a risk some investors are unwilling to take. What stands out contrary to this view is the response from the people on the streets that we have ran this concept by over and over again.

It’s the opinion of our future customers that has us believing that we are on to something, when the customers come the investors tend to follow.

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

Our first metric for success is creating a loyal base of consumers who come to our site every day for content relevant to their place in life. Eventually, these users will book travel with us, and help us to create the new category of Baby Showers For Guys. We will be seen as a strong emerging player in online travel, as well as a disruptor in the industry.

Secondly, we will have launched our second niche site targeted at expectant mothers, and be seeing a similar trend of consumer adoption for that site.

Thirdly, we will have secured our first round of angel investing that will allow us to continue growing the business and launching the third and fourth niche sites we have in the queue.

NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.

The European low cost carrier has spent the best part of the last 18 months discussing and testing its so-called AVOID (Airborne Volcanic Identifier and Detector) technology, a system fitted to aircraft to find minute ash particles at altitude.

EasyJet’s motivation came after the chaos caused to flight schedules when an Icelandic volcano spewed dangerous ash across large swathes of Europe in April 2010.

Here is a clip on the BBC this week about the technology currently being tested over Sicily:

But despite the ongoing tests and pleas to the European Union for support, some are wondering whether the technology can ever have the desired impact on the industry.

The Institution of Mechanical Engineers in the UK says the AVOID technology will only be useful “as long as it is rolled out widely”, a potential problem given that no other airline has supported the testing programme or said it will adopt the system at a later date.

Director of engineering Dr Colin Brown says the wider ash cloud detection programme needs further data and improvements to techniques currently used to measure and detect volcanic ash.

AVOID is “not a panacea”, Brown says, “it does not improve the tolerance of the aircraft to ash. It just tells us where not to go.”

“There also need to be further tests to ensure that the technology is accurate and sensitive enough to detect a variety of different ashes, in different weather conditions and at a variety of different densities.

“We need further tests to ensure the technique would be able to detect what are microscopic particles – comparable to detecting a postage stamp in an area the size of a football pitch from 100 kilometres away.”

Brown also questions whether the technology can be truly effective operationally.

He says:

“Finally, we mustn’t forget that while this technology might be able to detect ash clouds, pilots always fly aeroplanes in controlled airspace, and hence the opportunity to change course at short notice may be very limited.”

Here is O’Leary’s latest biography, included on a European Commission microsite to promote a conference on innovation where he was speaking earlier this week:

Such is the ire that the airline and O’Leary seem to attract, it is quite conceivable that perhaps the website had been hacked?

Of course not.

A Ryanair official confirms via email that the biography is indeed genuine, or at least is the one the airline submitted to the conference organisers.

The writers of the biography are probably the same team that came up with the pay-to-pee PR stunt, although the latter seemed to fool more people than the assertion that O’Leary is “irresistible” to women.

Full text of the original biography:

“Michael O’Leary has served as Ryanair CEO since 1993. Born in a stable in 1961, he was a boy genius, who excelled both academically and at sports. Having represented Ireland internationally at bog snorkelling and flower arranging, he graduated from Trinity College in Dublin as soon as they could get rid of him.

“He then became another boring KPMG accountant until divine inspiration sentenced to him to a life of penal servitude in the airline business. Despite his best efforts, Ryanair is the world’s favourite airline, with 1,300+ low fare routes across 27 countries.

“The airline has 45 European bases, a fleet of 272 Boeing 737 aircraft and will carry over 75 million passengers in the current financial year. All of Ryanair’s lowest fares are available only at www.RYANAIR.COM, which is Europe’s largest travel website. It is widely known that women find him irresistible.”

UPDATE: The reference to O’Leary’s attractiveness to the opposite sex has, curiously, now been removed!

NB: Apologies to all KPMG accountants. We are sure they’re all extremely fun individuals.

One such outfit is European airline BMIBaby, which has spent the past few months working with thousands of Instagram users to create its website destination guides.

The idea is quite simple: interact with 170 of the so-called Instagramer groups (collections of like-minded snappers around the world) and persuade them to tag their photos with the name of the destination.

The photos are then added to any of the 39 destination guides on the airline’s website, giving visitors a range of images taken by other users.

Instagram, for the uninitiated, is a online photo sharing service which uses various filters to turn even the weakest photograph into a more palatable (and quite often, pro-looking) image.

One of the first was a collection for Italy, all masterminded and aggregated using the #miaitalia hashtag on Instagram…

In just a month, over 3,000 photos were submitted to the site, with a public vote launched to let users decide on the best image. The winner received a free pair of flights to Italy.

The success of the Italy pilot prompted the airline to carry out similar competitions in a string of other countries, including Germany and Holland. Switzerland is next, the airline says.

An interesting aside to the initiative is a programme to fly various Instagrammers to other so-called Instameet around Europe (informal meet-ups).

Once again, during the get-together, attendees were asked to their tag images. The first event in London and second in Venice yielded a further 1,200 images for the website.

While BMIBaby has headed down the route of capturing content for its website, Air France has this week also muscled in on the Instagram craze, launching a competition for passengers to take a unique picture that best represents the airline, using the tagging function within the platform to aggregate all the entries.

Watch out for the airline in-flight magazine reference. Worth two minutes and 39 seconds of your time.

The decision to file coincides with an announcement of the retirement of chairman and CEO Gerard Arpey. He will be replaced by Thomas Horton.

The airline says it expects to continue normal operations during the Chapter 11 process, a procedure which allows companies to continue while wholesale changes are made to improve the financial footing of a business.

A statement says:

“We took this action in order to achieve a cost and debt structure that is industry competitive and thereby assure our long-term viability and ability to continue delivering a world-class travel experience for customers.”

The Wall Street Journal says the company has around $4.1 billion in “unrestricted cash and short-term investments”, allowing it to pay suppliers and other partners during the Chapter 11 procedure.

The airline filed a third quarter loss in November, blaming fuel expenses which have jumped 40% year-on-year.

Horton has spent 22 years with the airline, most recently as president of both AMR and AA. Today’s move is the first time in its history the airline has had to file for Chapter 11, making it the last of the major so-called legacy carriers in the US to do so.

The move follows last week’s disappointing loss in the US courts as it saw four our of five of its antitrust claims against Orbitz Worldwide and Travelport thrown out.

Horton says:

“American serves 260 airports in more than 50 countries and territories, and we are committed to maintaining a strong presence in worldwide markets.

“I am confident American will emerge even stronger as a global leader known for excellence and innovation, a travel partner customers seek out, and a carrier that serves communities throughout the world.”

So does the Chapter 11 filing mean it’s game over for American Airlines’ direct-connect push and its battles with Sabre and Travelport?

“I would say that remains to be seen, to be determined,” says travel attorney Mark Pestronk.

In other words, with Horton in and Arpey out, a reorganized American Airlines can decide whether it needs to alter its current distribution strategy.

In prior airline bankruptcies, carriers have used Chapter 11 proceedings to reject union contracts and office leases, but they never have tossed out GDS contracts, Pestronk says.

At any rate, American Airlines will have several months to decide about GDS contracts, Pestronk says, adding that the bankuptcy court for the Southern District of New York must decide on contracts before confirming the reorganization plan at the end of the proceedings.

The travel attorney says American Airlines’ antitrust lawsuits against Sabre and Travelport would not necessarily be impacted by the bankruptcy filing because the airline is the plaintiff in the cases.

Of course, American’s financial maneuverings could spur a settlement and new contract agreements with the GDS companies, if that is the approach that Horton wants to take.

Travelport declined to comment on AMR Corp.’s bankruptcy filing, and a Sabre spokeswoman says travel agents will still have access to American Airlines’ content and no near-term changes in the business relationship are expected.

“We are not going to comment on any potential implications of AA’s bankruptcy filing regarding the airline’s litigation against us or our relationship with AA,” says the Sabre spokeswoman, Nancy St. Pierre.

The airline’s debt structure will be part of the reorganization plan and the airline would have more time to pay on a reduced debt load.

In the bankruptcy filing, AMR Corp. says it has $29.5 billion in debts and $24.7 billion in assets.

Travel-related company which are among the 50 largest creditors include Hewlett Packard ($30.8 million), which is building American Airlines’ new reservation system; Boeing ($15.3 million); DFW International Airport ($7.3 million); Sky Chefs ($7 million); BCD Travel ($2.7 million) and Carlson Wagonlit Travel ($2.5 million).

Note: Dennis Schaal contributed to this story.

A few days on, after a hurricane of negative tweets, posts and down and dirty insults, Qantas has learned that social media is too powerful and dangerous a form of media to experiment on, especially when your staff and customers are looking for a fight.

Here’s what happened. Early in the day (November 22 Sydney time), Qantas launched a promotion around luxury and first class. Entrants had to tweet their “dream luxury in-flight experience” under the hashtag #qantasluxury.

The prize was a pair of first class Qantas pyjamas and an amenity kit. That’s right – the prize was not a flight, rather some left over stuff from the back of (okay, the front of) the plane.

Eighteen hours later and Twitter was still registering 25 tweets per second on this hashtag – almost all of them negative. At its peak, the hashtag stream was running at Matrix-like speed – impossible to read but impossible to turn away from.

#Qantasluxury became the place for customers (and presumably staff) to rant about the recent grounding, the failure of the subsequent enforced negotiation period, general declining levels of service, lost bags, bad meals, missed connections, declining service, the CEO’s pay increase and to just crack gags.

Here are some of my favourites:

#QantasLuxury – “when the passengers arrive before the couriers delivering the lockout notices do” @GrogsGamut

 

BREAKING NEWS: Qantas introduce #QantasLuxury class. Same as standard class, but the plane leaves the ground.@PuppyOnTheRadio

QANTASS – Quite A Number of Tweets, All Sarcastic #qantasluxury @michaelsname

#qantasluxury Somewhere in Qantas HQ a middle aged manager is yelling at a Gen Y social media “expert” to make it stop.” @kiwi_kali

My (possibly too-inside baseball) contribution:

#qantasluxury when words mean what they mean. When “streamline” ≠ me doing it, enhancement ≠ less points and new spirit ≠ pissed off staff” @hughestim

And the best of the responses actually goes to Qantas itself, when it tweeted(not realising the humour):

At this rate our #QantasLuxury competition is going to take years to judge.

The social media virus spread quickly. Stories appeared in mainstream press including newspapers such as The Age and The Australian. Forums such as Flyertalk and Frequent Flyer lit up with best of the best campaigns for tracking funny tweets.

The customer backlash on the social end of the spectrum spread to every other media channel.

The storm is reminiscent of the issues that Australian online accommodation provide Wotif hit in March this year over another failed social media competition. While the fall out was similar, the cause was very different.

In the case of the Wotif storm the cause was that the promotion did not live up to the hype. Wotif spent days building up a competition only to leave thousands of disappointed customers.

In the case of Qantas the failure was an a head-in-the-sand like mentality that it could ask people to say nice things about the brand while all around them the brand was taking a hammering from other issues.

I mentioned in a post on social media in March 2010 that a critical element to social media is having built up trust. Qantas launched this promotion at a time when trust in its brand could not be lower.

The news was dominated by the days Qantas spent grounded and by the news that the three-week peace between management and unions was over.

Customers are genuinely afraid that Christmas holiday plans are going to be smashed by industrial action. As much as Qantas spends on marketing trying to push “a new spirit”, passengers on flights are encountering angry staff and a bizarre pre and post flight announcement by the pilot reminding everyone how important it is for Qantas to be flown by Australian pilots.

Qantas’s trust levels are at all time low, consumers were looking for a way to rant back and staff were on the warpath. In other words the absolutely worst time in the world to be running a campaign encouraging people to say anything they wanted in an open forum.

We may be unsure as online executives whether or not social media is under-hyped or over-hyped but it is clear that you cannot leave social media as an after thought activity run in the same way as other marketing activities.

The airline’s big mistake here was believing that they could control or manage the responses in an open (social) environment. It appears they treated this competition like something you would submit on the back of a cereal packet. Where staff could review the ones they liked and chuck out the ones they didn’t.

Qantas gave life and a forum to the discontent out there.

Big lesson for all of us:

• do not do social media activity in isolation from the state of your brand.

Big message for Qantas:

• focus more on keeping your planes in the air and customers happy than the thread-count on your first class pyjamas.

Google says the international roll out of Flight Search is “coming soon”, although it is expected to be a staggered launch in individual markets rather than a simultaneous unveiling across the rest of the world.

In his first media interview since Google announced its intention to buy ITA Software for $700 million in July 2010, former-CEO of Massachusetts-based ITA, Jeremy Wertheimer, now vice president for travel at ITA Software by Google, would not disclose an exact timeframe for the launches.

One option would be to begin with relatively limited functionality in terms of the cities and airlines covered by Flight Search, similar to how the US launch was introduced in September this year.

This would depend on any agreements Google is able to negotiate over the course of the next few months, Wertheimer says.

It is not known if the policy of only carrying search results from airlines will be used in other markets as it was in the US, once again excluding online travel agencies from participating in results.

But there are now also the first significant signs that other travel products are also being lined up for launch, with car hire appearing to be an obvious contender.

Nothing is off the table as yet, is the impression being given by Wertheimer, although in true Google fashion the emphasis is on “testing” and “experimenting” with ideas, rather than confirming one way or the other that a particular product line in the industry will be next on the list.

Other likely areas considered might be tours and activities or vacation rentals, for example, although Wertheimer declined to divulge precise plans.

How to address one of the most significant challenges with expanding Flight Search outside of the US, where the general perception is that ITA’s coverage is weaker, is still unclear.

Wertheimer says Google will secure partnerships with both airlines or “data providers” to introduce Flight Search in other markets, although he refuses to disclose any further details or if any of fare shopping providers or the GDSs (Travelport‘s ePricing or the MetaPricer product from Amadeus, are just two of a number of sources) will be involved.

“We will work with whoever we can in order to get the data,” he says.

Just 31% of Brits say they will purchase a travel product on a mobile device, compared to a 39% average across Europe.

Politics and economy troubled Italians have come in the highest in the annual travel trends survey by TripAdvisor, with 57% claiming they would book a travel product via a mobile.

Over half (54%) of Brits declined outright to purchase travel online via a non-desktop or laptop machine, the survey of over 6,000 Europeans found.

Meanwhile, concerns about the state of the economy is the biggest worry for Brits in their 2012 travel plans, knocking last year’s concern of volcanic ash off the top spot.

A third reckon the economy is their biggest concern, although only 27% of Europeans as a whole have a similar worry.