Learning from the Airlines

Anyone who has been with me on an airline will know that I do not travel well by air. I do not mind the experience of flying. In fact, I rather enjoy it, even when there is some turbulence. It is similar to a Disney World ride only longer. But I do not like queuing, queuing again, and queuing yet again, taking off my shoes, removing my belt (and having to hold my trousers up), taking out my laptop, and standing on the bus to the plane and then waiting for the couple who decided to check in five minutes before the flight time etc etc.

Then there is the tinny recording of a woman that has been in use for five years at London City Airport, telling us that any unidentified baggage found may be taken away and destroyed. (How many of us have remembered our baggage or children because of a “safety” announcement? “Oh it was a good thing that we heard that announcement or we might have left the baby in Starbucks.”) The announcement repeats this and other “useful and informative” messages every two minutes to make sure that you do not get too settled in your book, newspaper or Sudoku puzzle.

It is possible to create some light diversions out of all this. There are not many opportunities, but there are some, especially for the infantile and immature of us, of which I definitely count myself as one.

There is the “be last on to the plane” competition. Who can sit on the seat in the boarding area the longest? Upon the announcement to board the plane, most people stand up and join the queue almost immediately. Winning this game involves having nerves of steel, avoiding eye contact with other seated passengers, and pretending not to notice the other person playing the same game.

This game can never be won, as even if you think that you are the last person through the gate, there is always the couple who decided to check in five minutes before the flight time and who turn up after you.

There is a variation on this game, which is to sit in the wrong boarding area for a flight departing before yours and to sit there, pretending to play this game. The other participants will admire your nerves of steel, before conceding defeat and going through the gate.

Juvenile games aside, in terms of “Let’s really annoy and stress our customers” there are few organisations to beat airports. I am convinced that they employ people who think up new ways of making the experience as uncomfortable as possible. This is a new form of “Customer Experience”. These are the people whom Tesco fired when they suggested that, as a cost cutting exercise, it would be a good idea to operate only one checkout at 10.00 am on a Saturday morning.

The latest innovation in the “Let’s annoy the customer” game are automatic boarding card gates. You are required to swipe your boarding card in a number of different directions, at least twenty times, and have two members of passport control come over to make suggestions on the best way of swiping it.

The automatic passport face recognition system is a variation on this, designed to lengthen queues, and reduce unemployment by increasing the need for passport control staff and embarrassing the public as the machine tries to work out who they are.

However, Nat West and RBS, after their recent “Oh dear, we have lost all your data” problems, could do worse than copy the example of some airline staff at boarding. When the flight is called, the passengers swipe their boarding cards and show their passports. Now here is the clever bit. The airline staff now ask for the boarding card again, which you have just put away, and crosses your name off a list with a pencil (remember them – long thin things which you can write with).

You thought that the computer did this. Well, it probably does, but I guess that the staff don’t trust the computer (quite right!) and do their own check as well. If RBS had followed this line of thinking, then they might not have ended up in the pickle that they did. I think that there could be a whole new branch of consultancy here.

Consultants could advise on how to check the computer. The young unemployed could be employed to check transactions on computer printouts. They could file hundred and thousands of sheets of paper to be kept, just in case the computer goes down. A whole parallel processing area could be developed.

All we need now is a name for this new business practice. Any suggestions?