Ai Editorial: Is any player good enough to offer a door-to-door journey?

First published on 22nd June, 2016

Ai Editorial on ground transportation: Ireland-based Kevin O’Shaughnessy, founder of Indigo.gt explains how the industry can improve the customer experience in this arena

Is reaching a destination, and then proceeding to a hotel or moving around in a city a smooth experience yet?

Before we delve deeper, there are many facets from which this aspect of a journey can be looked upon.

One could be sheer utility angle – just boarding a bus or taking a cab to reach my hotel. Of course, car hailing apps are there to avail, but what if going online isn’t possible. Yes, if you happen to be in an airport like New Delhi, just don’t assume you can go online that easily even if it’s free. Moving on one can also enjoy the peculiar ways one can travel – trams, bikes, train, vaporetto, gondolas, carts, cruise etc.

I will give you an example. I have been planning a trip to Switzerland. I chose Zurich, Lucerne, Lauterbrunnen, Montreux and Geneva as my places to visit. Yes, I could check options to reach hotel in each of the places via hotel website or via booking.com (post booking email/ in-app content link). But several of my questions remained unanswered unless I chose to research online. For instance, is there any option to take a cruise from Zurich to Lucerne? Not really, but one can enjoy cruise from Lake Zurich or Lake Lucerne. Directions and mode of transport can be checked via Google Maps, but there are times when I struggled with it. Google Maps came closest to sharing options – for instance, Hotel Astoria in Lucerne to Lauterbrunnen, one could find out the exact routing, time and stops for rail, car etc.

But I wasn’t completely satisfied with the experience. What if Gmail could analyze my emails – my dates of travel, air ticketing and hotel bookings – to send me a link for moving around! I would readily give access to any sort of permission Google might seek, and would rather present with me options.

Game changer

Ireland-based Kevin O’Shaughnessy, founder of Indigo.gt, a search and reservation platform for airport-to-city transfers, says if every journey for business or leisure was considered a door-to-door journey from a planning as well as a booking perspective, rather than just directing users to the flight segment, we could show users a complete itinerary and allow them to book the entire thing in one step.

Kevin says overnight, this would change the dynamics of airline web bookings, online travel agencies and meta-search companies.

“This specifically means that instead of thinking of ground transport as an afterthought, it becomes a peer in a shared itinerary with flight content. The core technology to deliver this is here today: how long before the taxi app proposes to “take me home”, and streamline the flight booking as part of the process?”

Airlines are uniquely positioned in the market to profit from delivering a better user experience that comes from the transport utility, stated Kevin.  

Opportunity for airlines

For the majority of air passengers, transport to/ from the airport — whether in car rental, chauffeur drive, metro or their own car — is a utility class of product: it is a functional part of the journey.

“If this is true, then the only real room for improvement are the external elements, such as the pickup experience. With the advances in ground transport technology and choice of providers, there is no reason airlines cannot take a lead in the passenger experience, turning a utility product into a positive experience. In doing so, airlines can also capitalize on the revenue opportunities, too,” said Kevin.

It needs to be highlighted that in the last 3 years, the data roaming charges in Europe have gone from extortionate to virtually free (part-driven by regulation), and many early adopters the world over have made the switch to tariffs which allow data on their handsets. Frequent travelers typically have the “roaming” switch set to “on” and there’s a good crossover between this behavior and use of taxi apps in a foreign destination. “The next major shift in transport innovation could well be driven by more widespread trends in passenger behavior when it comes to that roaming setting. If everybody could use data anywhere tomorrow, and since local taxi apps are commonplace, the biggest winners in the space — from a travel industry perspective — will be those apps. Airlines have therefore a very short runway indeed to capture — and profit from — this latent behavior common to the majority of their passengers,” explained Kevin.  

Current gaps

As a traveller, Kevin says he attempts to optimize time and cost, but different passengers have different priorities. As for gaps, he points out:

-       Not all the answers are in the online maps: not all the detail is there: not every mode of transport is shown, traffic information is patchy so timing will be off, cost is usually not there.

-       There’s an onus on the passenger to “learn the destination”. I think airlines do go a certain distance to promote new routes and to give basic routing information to the city area.

-       These different elements in the hands of passengers creates a type of “Travel Math” where they need to calculate the landing time, estimate the waiting time for their chosen transport, calculate the transit time. Then, they can finally propose a meeting at a certain time.

-       At the airport, not all services are treated equally. The pick-up for different car services are relegated to car parks, different levels or more convenient exits. The same holds true for coaches: different commercial deals mean that some will be more convenient for passengers than others.

-       Sometimes regulation or industry-wide tech adoption means that booking rail on mobile still means that passengers still need to pick up paper tickets, or that local transit tickets are only available to locals. This is slowly changing.

Here one must add that typically, airports profit well from ground transport companies: levies are applied to operating taxis and car services, rail is charged at a premium, bus stands are expensive and pick-up points for shuttles are all billed liberally. Since the revenue is already captured, at least to a certain extent, there’s less of an incentive to “go digital” and, only with a handful of exceptions, airport “ground transport” pages are limited to names of operating companies and basic destination information only. This is improving, very slowly, but airports are falling short of what they can do to improve the passenger journey.

Making it easy

Kevin says every market has its own habits.

“While taxi/ car services are popular across the US — this is not the case in large US metro areas or in Europe. In some markets, rail trips to/ from the airport are as high as 65%. Where high speed rail links exist, the typical take-up rate is about 35% of all passengers to/ from an airport,” said Kevin.  

The problem, however, isn’t the product, according to him.

“Ultimately, ground transport — whether taxi or train — is a “local transport” product, which has been built for local residents over the last 50-100 years. This is perhaps why we must think of “transport” and “travel” as not being the same thing,” said Kevin. “Local transport, as a product, is not built for air passengers. Communicating options clearly and openly is key,” he says.  

Referring to Europe, Kevin says rail and air behave differently in terms of information systems.

“We see plenty of innovation in train operating companies, but, to date, no credible source which brings all rail content together in a meaningful way for consumers,” he says.

When we “learn” a destination, we capture local knowledge in the right way for us. This is known as “embedded information” and the process of capturing and using this in online systems is difficult. To date, the travel industry hasn’t had a “common language” to apply to the intricate networks of and routes — whether to use them in a useful way for passengers or to monetize them somehow. “There’s no simple way of capturing the basics and communicating them simply. To date, only Google Maps has come close to this, maybe Rome2Rio, but both are missing the ability to transact,” says Kevin. “In some cases, this is hampered by local regulation or alliances. Only with some exceptions in the UK, rail is still mostly paper-ticket based. The trendy mobile apps you use still send you off to a machine to collect a paper ticket: basically reducing the mobile component to “search with a transaction” rather than issuing a fully-electronic ticket. In some cases, large rail operators in Europe intentionally restrict access to inventory, or lay on additional fees, in an effort to maintain consumer exclusivity.”

“Today, a door-to-door journey needs either time and effort on the part of the passenger to line up all the elements or, alternatively, some seriously smart technology, which we still haven’t seen yet,” Kevin.

He asserts that all ground transportation should be as easy to use as a taxi hailing app, and to achieve this, it means that all the inventory, pricing, commercials, payment technology, legal acceptance of terms and conditions by passengers needs to be visible and instantly available (meaning less than a second) for booking.

“This can be brokered through standards, but none has emerged yet. Business and Leisure travel could be transformed completely if the local transport component became an integral part of travel planning,” explained Kevin.

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