“When connectivity made it to airplanes in the early 2000s, passengers would be happy to have connectivity at all,” said Gustavo Nader, Thales’ VP of strategy for InFlyt Experience, at SATELLITE 2019’s panel on In-Flight Connectivity. “The pace of evolution over the last decade on passenger expectations hasn’t equally been met yet by the connectivity providers. We’re bridging that gap.”
Gogo EVP Jonathan Cobin said consistency is critical: “The number one dissatisfier to a user is if it does not work consistently well. If there’s an expectation of service and it wasn’t working, that is the biggest problem.”
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Gogo is exploring ways to give flight crew tools to troubleshoot small issues. “Them just saying ‘There’s a problem and I can’t tell you anything about it,’ or making something up is not good either,” Cobin said.
Southwest Airlines’ Tara Bamburg noted the airline made “a huge shift internally to focusing on the customer experience.” She noted that if a passenger uses IFC and has a negative experience, “it is pretty clearly negatively expressed in their Net Promoter Scores, and that has a negative impact on the Southwest bottom line.”
Delta’s Director of Supply Chain Management Technology Hamp Haucke said: “Right now, we don’t have a good sense of how to prioritize data usage. The IoT piece of it is there and picking up steam.” Delta and Southwest are both exploring ways to personalize in-flight entertainment and advertising based on passenger preferences. VS
