Archives for posts with tag: Travel
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Le Shuttle – Bonne Vitesse, Mauvaise Experience?

March 26, 2014 //
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I had occasion, dear reader, to go to France and Italy a few weekends ago. It was a bit of a road trip – with some planes and trains thrown in for good measure – and one of the earlier legs was the Eurotunnel from Folkstone to Calais. I’ve been on the Eurostar from London to Paris, but never the car-train thingy.

I didn’t know what to expect. I hadn’t booked the tickets as it was a surprise held in my dubious honour, so I hadn’t gone onto the website to see what it was all about. I was going in cold, which is always interesting from a marketeer’s perspective. It is always incredibly valuable to experience the customer journey through your product or service for the first time, because once you’ve got your feet under the table and you know where to look, what to do and what to expect, you can’t help first-time visitors navigate big idea any more.

I was expecting something like a cross between the car ferry and the Eurostar. Drive on, dump the car, chill for a couple hours, drive off. So, imagine my surprise when we drove onto a ‘carriage’ that houses about 3 or 4 cars and sat there. You can either sit in your car and feel mildly seasick as the train speeds through the tunnel, or you can get out of your car and walk up and down the side. There’s an emergency loo, but no cafeteria, no entertainment, no view, nothing.

I examined the inside of the carriage. There were lots of emergency notices and information about what you can’t do. What I didn’t know was that the journey is only 35 minutes long and there’s not much you can do.

One thing that struck me was that there was nothing to manage expectations for the first time traveller. You have to find stuff out for yourself, when it’s too late.

How hard would it be to produce a 3-minute video that runs in the terminal and the carriages to give you more information on the customer experience? It would put you at ease, enhance the experience and make you spend more money in the terminal, knowing that you would be without food and drink for the best part of an hour.

I’m not saying Le Shuttle is Le Shittle, far from it. It’s a massive investment and a huge time and money saver. It’s no nonsense, not quite ‘quick and dirty’ but certainly at the functional end of travel. What I am saying is that they need to work on the customer experience. And, when they do, everybody wins.

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Categories Communication, Customers

The Kindness of Strangers In Small Places

March 19, 2014 //
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One of the several things that I really like about where I live is that people say hello to you in the street. People you don’t know. Strangers.

I live in a small town – it would be considered a village in my native country – in the west of Ireland. It’s quite normal to say hello, smile, nod or exchange a view on the weather with people you don’t know a few times during a walk through the town. I really like it.

People are familiar with the friendly welcome of the Irish – cead mile failte, or a hundred thousand welcomes and all that – but I suspect you get this level of friendliness in all small places.

You don’t get this in a big city, at least in not a single one I’ve ever been to, and I’ve probably only been to a couple hundred in my life. People don’t make eye contact, their body language is self-protecting, they avoid making any kind of acknowledgement of your presence. Maybe this is because it feels like everything is transient, unsafe, or unfamiliar in a seething population, but to me it’s a pity. We’re social animals after all, and interaction with fellow humans improves our mood, most of the time.

Next time you’re out and about in a city, try saying hello to a couple of passers-by. Better still, when you’re in a city with an underground system, strike up a conversation with someone across from you, across the central walkway I call ‘the well of souls’. The looks you get can be hilarious:

‘What are you doing, talking to me? You’re breaking the code!”

‘What code?’

‘The unwritten code of the city. No talking to anyone you don’t know. Loser!’

Give me the kindness of strangers in small places any time.

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Categories Communication, General

The Nirvana of Perfectly Efficient Connections

January 17, 2014 //
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When I sit on a London-bound train and don’t want to shut the world away and write, like I’m doing right now, I like to soak up the ambience of my train carriage and home in on some of the mobile conversations that the less discrete business people tend to have after their meetings in the UK’s capital.

As well as the standard business shorthand phrases like ‘food for thought’, ‘keep moving forward’, ‘in this together’ etc. I usually have this unexplainable – as opposed to inexplicable – feeling of sadness wash over me. Not because I want to work where they work, but because of the inherent unproductiveness of big society where a mass of people mills around like atoms in a pan of boiling water.

All these people travel together with strangers into the big city, head to their specific meeting with their customer, partner or supplier, conduct their business, scurry back to their travel hub and head back home. They use the journey back for follow-up calls, post mortems, problems, solutions and actions, all within earshot and sight of another band of strangers.

And that, for me, is the modern big city: a vast collection of people on the move, in between things, trying desperately to minimise their A to B time and expenses. Whole industries built around a state of perpetual transience.

The promise of the Internet is that it can bring us together in ways that the phone never could do. Despite the advantages that the face to face element of Skype and video conferencing delivers, nothing has yet replaced the physical meeting as the pinnacle of human interaction and collaboration.

And hence the sadness. We crave interaction from our fellow humans, yet meeting them is all so inefficient. Teleportation would be extremely handy, but in the absence of that, I always wonder if there is a better way to co-ordinate these millions of criss-crossing journeys.

I think when I get back to my home office I’m going to stew on that and not come out until I have fixed it. Or in case someone wants to see me for a meeting…

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Marketing, Sales, Technology

The Trouble with Travel

October 25, 2013 //
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The connected economy makes it increasingly easier for us to be productive from the comfort of our laptop or smart device. You still can’t beat a face-to-face, though, and for that you need to travel.

I had occasion to travel yesterday, for a meeting in London, in and out from Ireland in the space of a few hours. Three events reminded me of how travel is still not the experience it should be, and it boils down – like most things, to how you treat customers and your peers, or in this case, fellow travellers, and how you plan.

Firstly, boarding the plane. It always amazes me how people will be oblivious to their fellow passengers as they block the aisles, take ages loading up their bags or taking things out of their bags before they sit down. And this is despite the gentle encouragement of the airline to find your seat as quickly as possible.  Is it so hard to plan out in your head as you look for your seat: ‘now what do I need out of my bag before I sit down and where is it? It’s like those people who queue in a shop to pay for something and then when it’s their turn they don’t have their money ready, as if the last thing they expected in the world was for them to be expected to pay for their item. Sheesh.

Secondly, near monopolies are always a problem from a service point of view. Take the much touted London Heathrow Express. I can’t think of a more expensive train journey on a per mile basis. I opted to go straight through Terminal 1 on arrival to use the bathroom on the train. Guess what? There was only 1 toilet on the train and it was out of order. I also have data roaming switched off when I travel overseas, so I wanted to use the wireless. Guess what? No wireless. ‘Oh dear, no toilet and no wireless,’ mused the conductor almost wistfully. Oh dear indeed. It’s 2013, you need to provide a better service for a 15-minute, £20 journey.

Thirdly, sometimes airports just don’t help themselves. The competition for your patronage among airports is really fierce, yet Shannon Airport must have taken the news about new Ryanair Routes coming to Shannon as a chance to take the day off. As we were coming into land, we started ascending, increasing in speed and circling. It turned out the Airport’s landing system and radar had become unserviceable (unserviceable – hello?!) and we were diverted to Dublin, where we refuelled and waited for them to fix things. As I waited in Dublin, I noticed on the airport website that the Ryanair flight (I was flying Aer Lingus) from Manchester had landed anyway. Maybe it’s true they don’t cary excess fuel and were landing come hell or high water. The fact that there either is no back-up system, or the back-up failed is amazing to me in an industry where ‘5 nines’ uptime is the sine qua non of being in the business. This meant I arrived 2 and half hours later than planned, and I went to enquire whether the airport would be prepared to pay for the extra parking. The airport in turn blamed Aer Lingus and the Irish Aviation Authority. I went to pay for my parking and found that by 9 minutes I had tripped over into the 12-24 hour rate, which was a staggering €19.50. When you drive into the parking the signage recommends you stay short term for under 24 hours, which is a serious disservice to those coming in and out in one day.

When we did land, we had the most labyrinthine route you can imagine to get out of the building, despite the fact that we were the only passengers left in the place.  It was as long as it takes to get out of Terminal 1, which is 10 times the size.

This kind of experience leads you to voice your frustration on the social media and online review channels, which in the connected economy comes back to bite the service provider. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that if you provide a good service, it creates a virtuous cycle, not a vicious one, to borrow from Michael D Watkins terminology.

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Categories Customers, General
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