Essays

It’s Almost as Good as Getting an Actual Tour!

I went to tour an apartment recently in a brand new building.  When I arrived the leasing agent took me into the office and gestured for me to sit in front of a large plasma screen.

This immediately conjured memories of the BU Experience video – a 25 minute video designed to appeal to would-be undergraduates touring the BU campus.  They also show it at employee orientation.  Nobody gets to talk about health insurance until we’ve all listened to the immortal words of Martin Luther King (which, according to banners outside Marsh Plaza back in February, included the phrase “lorem ipsum“).

The Experience was a $3 million experiment that ultimately proved nothing more than that people are capable of editing segments of video into a presentation.  It carries graphics on par with Fox News, and flashy integrations of interviews and inspirational music.  It’s really the same video colleges have been producing for years, but instead of sending it out on DVD to students’ homes BU shows it in a theater dedicated to the purpose.  Promotional material and uncomfortable seats.  It’s a bargain.

Only students at Appalachian are really envious of BU’s approach.  Watch that video for even a few seconds and you’ll understand why.

In the leasing office of my potential future apartment, I saw a far more effective use of high technology as a marketing tool.

The plasma screen was mounted at an angle, with chairs in front of it.  At first, it just showed a 3D rendering of the floors in the building. Touch a floor, though, and it expands to show the layout of apartments on that floor.  The layout is color coded by price range, and labeled with the basics (e.g., how many bedrooms are in each unit).

Touch a particular apartment and it expands to show the floor plan inside.  Touch a secret spot (hint: it’s the corporate logo) and the screen adds the monthly rent to the display.  Touch buttons at the bottom of the screen and you can see views inside the space and perhaps out the window – features that I couldn’t use, since there were no photos available yet for the brand new building.

Nothing about this display is inherently novel.  Anybody in the world can download the same floor plans from the building’s website, and can explore prices for available apartments.  Touch screens have been around for decades, when their most public use was to order roast beef sandwiches at Arby’s.  Semi flashy animation is ubiquitous even on the web now.

What makes it exciting is that it organizes information in a way that makes sense, perhaps for the first time in the history of apartment leasing.  It generates the desire to explore.  I might want to check out the price differential between similar apartments on different floors of the building.  That takes just three taps per apartment.

You might be interested in comparing the views and floor plans for different apartments in the same price range.  Check out the dark blue apartment on one side of the building and you’ll see a small one bedroom with gorgeous Boston views; check out the dark blue apartment on the opposite corner and you’ll see a spacious two bedroom with views of the railroad yard.

It doesn’t take a lot of energy (just a lot of creativity) to put technology to good use.  An overproduced video?  No.  An interactive apartment finder?  Yes.

On the other hand, this was the same buildling that has a plasma screen in the mail room with little icons for apartments with packages waiting – 1313 with a little hanger icon means there’s dry cleaning waiting.  My current apartment solves this organizational problem by leaving a little tag on our mailbox – a system that hasn’t crashed once since I moved in.

No, Seriously, What’s the Deal With It?

I believe two things.

First, the airlines deserve to be skewered for a variety of reasons. Even before 9/11 there was a certain decline in service, and now added security (especially after the London attacks that brought us the “3-2-1” rules for liquids in carry-ons) has us stressed just about the process of going to the airport, much less getting on the plane.

Second, the reasons most people choose to gripe about airlines are unconsidered and counterproductive. The more time we spend griping about dumb things the less we have to gripe about things that matter.
For instance, is it really so hard to understand why we get the mantra, “In preparation for landing, please ensure your seat backs and tray tables are in their full upright position?” If something happens during landing (which is when 45% of all airplane accidents occur), you’ll want to leave the plane in a hurry. You won’t particularly want your tray table blocking your exit, and I certainly don’t want your reclined seat blocking mine.

And what’s the deal with airline food? We know by now (thanks to Science) that our sense of taste is diminished at high altitudes. So why task the airline with cooking food in advance to prepare in tiny airplane galleys for hundreds of people at once? Of course it won’t end well for anybody! Either go without food for a few hours – a reasonable request between mealtimes – or buy something at the airport before leaving. The “Street Pricing Policy” at Logan and other airports nationwide even dictates that you won’t overpay for food at the airport.

So what should we be griping about, if not classic bits of comedian fodder? The airlines’ only real responsibility: getting us to our destinations on time.

We cannot reasonably demand perfection, of course. Too many variables impact flight schedules. Passengers on a flight from Dulles to Miami might insist weather is no factor when it’s beautiful and sunny along the entire coast, until they reflect that the plane they’re waiting for started its day in San Francisco, where it’s raining and windy. And is there anybody aboard who, upon learning of a mechanical failure, would say, “Eh. Let’s go anyway.”

Instead of pushing for perfection of scheduling, the airlines should be prepared to work around delays. In particular, when that poor San Francisco flight gets delayed all the way across the country, the passengers waiting for the plane in Dulles shouldn’t be affected. Surely some airplane is available in Dulles; let them board that one. Put the people from that plane on whichever one is ready next. Then when the San Francisco plane shows up (eventually) you’ll be caught up, possibly without introducing any extra delays at all.

Of course, this only works with interchangeable aircraft. We can’t take 285 passengers from a Boeing 777 and put them on a 114-seat Boeing 737. For many airlines, though, this is a reasonable restriction. Ted (the United Airlines spinoff) operates every flight on an Airbus A320, for example. Other airlines use only two or three types of equipment.

Ground crews shouldn’t be heavily impacted by such a policy. The decision to use a certain aircraft would have to be made somewhat in advance, giving crews enough time to get luggage and fuel aboard normally. Catering won’t be affected at all, since there should be no catering in the first place.

The real burden of this system would fall to passengers. Instead of going straight to a single gate, we’d have to check, say, an hour before departure to see which gate has our flight. This is similar to how trains leave from Penn Station in New York. You have no idea which track will host your train until it arrives and it’s time to board. True, this won’t work in all airport configurations (e.g., some airports have small clusters of gates, and going between clusters requires leaving the sterile area). At many airports it would still work fine.

And of course this isn’t a flawless system. It’s a “spherical chickens in a vacuum” solution to suppose we can just mix and match flights freely. Sometimes the crew from one flight is needed for another; sometimes the physical plane needs to end up in a certain city for maintenance. But this is the era of computer modeling. Are we really saying there’s nothing we can do?

Next Idea: Self-Service X-Ray Machines

The TSA has been experimenting with a setup that lets passengers self-sort into separate “expert traveler” screening lanes for travelers who are fluent in TSA procedures. If you don’t want to be rushed or need more time you can choose the slower “family” lane instead. Some airports also have an intermediate “frequent traveler” category.

The screening procedures are identical for all lanes; the theory is just that expert travelers will follow those procedures more efficiently. I’ve been caught behind idiots who don’t understand that keys are made of metal or that the rest of us took off our shoes for a reason, so I appreciate the potential value of this segregation. Moreover, I applaud the broader effort to try new ideas to smooth out the complex screening process.

In practice, however, this idea fails completely. I just saw it in action at DIA – one of a few airports in the pilot program – and it just didn’t work.

I saw only two lanes designated for the “family” category when I went through, yet both were completely empty – not a single person was in either line. All the remaining lines were designated “expert traveler” and were clogged seven or eight people deep. I forfeited my (deserved) “expert” title and breezed through the family lane without missing a step.

In one sense this was a fluke. Surely at other times the family lane has at least a few people in it, and one uncoordinated parent with a disobedient young child could shift the entire balance. However, it highlights fundamental underlying problems.

First, lots of people want to believe they’re experts when they’re really not. And even genuine experts can make mistakes. Normally I fly through security in a smooth anti-terrorism ballet. Then came the mishap a couple months ago when I waltzed right through still wearing my cell phone and keys. Sorry, folks. I just held up the line. I know keys are metal, I swear!

More importantly, the total wait time in the entire system is exactly the same; it’s just being redistributed. The slowpoke who takes five minutes to sort luggage and remove liquids will still take five minutes, he’ll just be holding up a different line. The assumption is that slow people will be more tolerant of other slow people.

The same theory went into the Box Office Babies program at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline. Parents can bring their babies to the movies and let them cry as much as they want. Crying babies in these screenings are no less disruptive than in any other screenings; they’re just disrupting other people who happen to have babies themselves.  Some parents would still prefer to watch the movie uninterrupted, so they opt not to go to Box Office Babies (and presumably wait for the movie to be out on DVD).

At airports we don’t have the option of just bypassing the security line (perhaps a door marked “No Criminals Allowed” would work?), but some inexperienced travelers will still want to stand on the shoulders of experts before them and breeze through what was (until then) the fast lane.

Finally, this idea solves a problem many airports have already solved by just ushering those who fail the screening for any reason into a separate line to try again. A know-nothing novice with bottled water in his backpack and a knife in his pocket gets brushed aside, as does a seasoned guru who just forgot to empty his pockets this trip.

This system has TSA officials doing the sorting, so there’s no chance of someone being in the “wrong” line. And this way travelers don’t have to learn yet another policy on their way through the security maze. For me, choosing which type of line to join added a second or two of decision-making time, when I’d normally just glance around and hop into the shortest one.  (It doesn’t help that the “black diamond / blue square / green circle” designations, so obvious to those who ski, meant absolutely nothing to me until I read more about it.)

We should welcome new ideas from the TSA even when they don’t work out, but let’s scrap this one before it’s too late and we have to listen to a New Yorker with no luggage mouthing off to the foreigner in front of him who won’t take off his chain mail in the black diamond lane.

Congratulations! You’ve Shown Basic Human Intelligence!

“American Airlines, bowing to pressure yesterday from some of its lowest-paid workers, agreed to drop a $2-per-bag fee for curbside check-in service at airports throughout the country and to lift a ban on tips for skycaps at Logan International Airport.” – Boston Globe, 30 May 2008

I wrote about this issue a few weeks ago, when American retaliated against the skycaps (nine of whom won back $325,000 in lost tips in a lawsuit last month) by prohibiting all tipping at Logan. Now, in exchange for the skycaps dropping their charge of retaliation, the airline will allow tipping and get rid of the fee.

Of course, in just two weeks American will begin charging $15 to check even a single bag, so the old $2 fee to check a bag at the curb rather pales in comparison to the $15 it will cost to check one at all. This too will surely cut into the tips of skycaps, since fewer people will check bags at all (as is surely the intent) and those who do will again feel they’ve spent enough on the luxury already without giving their money away in gratuities. Since this fee isn’t levied directly against curbside check-in, I expect skycaps’ only choices will be to accept their new burden or defect to one of the few airlines that still allows checked luggage.

We should be glad American has backed off its ludicrous stance on tipping at Logan, but let’s not throw them a party. They’ve just done what they should have from the beginning. When a toddler finally concedes he can’t eat dessert before dinner we don’t offer a reward of extra cookies, we just announce our approval of his being a good little boy.

A Tip for American Airlines

“American Airlines, which lost a federal lawsuit filed by skycaps at Logan International Airport over tips they earn, ratcheted up the feud yesterday by imposing a ban on tips at the Boston airport.” – Boston Globe, 2 May 2008

Let me quickly recap the events.

Back in 2004, American Airlines started charging a fee of $2 per bag for checking in bags at the curb. This fee went to the airline, and not its skycaps, but the traveling public tended not to draw the distinction, and tipped less.

True, signs at the curb informed travelers that the fee didn’t include a gratuity, but those signs used comically small lettering. Other signs at airports discuss things like the legal penalties for taking explosive devices onto a 480-ton Boeing 747 with 415 other passengers aboard, so we can forgive a hurried traveler for not paying adequate attention to American’s tiny lettering about gratuities.

Other travelers may have read and disregarded the notice, having already decided what they were willing to pay for curbside check-in. “I’ll pay $5 for this,” such miserly people thought, “even if 40% of it now goes in the airline’s pocket.”

American Airlines advances the reasonable belief that decreasing tips had more to do with decreasing air travel overall than with any fee or airline policy.

The reason isn’t important. Tips fell, and skycaps were angry. Skycaps took the airline to court, and got a verdict in their favor last month. American has to repay $325,000 in lost tips to nine employees.

That was April 17.

Two weeks later, we find that American has prohibited tipping of any kind and has promised disciplinary action to any skycap who accepts money from a passenger.

They raised skycaps’ pay above minimum wage to make the whole thing legal, but the move is still mean-spirited and below the belt. Penalizing skycaps at Logan – and only at Logan – comes off as childish.

I won’t be flying American anymore.