By Mitch Lipka
NEW YORK, July 24 (Reuters) – Want to order a snack or drink
on a plane without flagging down a flight attendant? Book dinner
and theater tickets at your destination? Watch a catalog of TV
shows on demand?
Sure, but why can’t you do it already?
Dave Pedersen, a 30-year-old media director for a tech
public relations firm in San Francisco, recently took a flight
on Virgin America Airways Ltd where he ordered snacks,
water and a movie via a touch screen on his seat-back and paid
about $15.
Flying on planes that show a preselected movie from shared
screens seems “old and archaic,” Pedersen says. He can’t
understand why more airlines aren’t on board yet with the new
technology.
Technology providers and airline industry analysts say they
soon will be, and that real-time shopping in the sky is soon
going to be as routine as the availability of the SkyMall
catalog. How services will be delivered and whether you’ll be
drawn into spending freely, as the airlines and service
providers hope, is still up in the air.
One route is simply providing Wi-Fi access and letting
passengers do whatever they want on their own devices. About 38
percent of all domestic flights in the United States have Wi-Fi,
according to a study by Routehappy.com, which analyzes in-flight
amenities for travelers.
Yet so far, less than 5 percent of those passengers use
Wi-Fi service. One reason is the cost, says Bob Mann, an airline
industry analyst for R.W. Mann & Co.
Price, however, is a barrier that solves another problem –
bandwidth. Quality Internet service now available on flights has
meant an increase in users; too many can slow down delivery.
Gogo LLC, which says it has more than 80 percent market
share of U.S. domestic in-flight Wi-Fi, sells a 24-hour Internet
pass for $14, and monthly access for frequent flyers for $49.95
on nine participating airlines, according to Ash Eldifrawi,
chief commercial officer for Gogo.
To compensate for bandwidth challenges, flights are carrying
servers with a library of movies and TV shows that can be
directly accessed through seat-backs and personal devices – for
a fee, of course.
On certain Delta Air Lines Inc flights, you can
select from a collection of up to 300 movies through your
seat-back for $6 apiece. Flyers can even use eBay or
Amazon.com from their own devices without having to pay
for online access.
JetBlue Airways Corp, which already offers free
in-flight satellite TV, is testing a high-speed satellite
Internet access system that would also allow passengers to
stream video from sites such as Hulu and Netflix. The
Wi-Fi will stay free at least through the installation of the
service on the first 30 planes, says Tamara Young, JetBlue
spokeswoman.
She expects the service to be ramped up through 2014. It’s
not clear what will happen once it spreads throughout the fleet
or how much it will cost to use streaming video.
HOW AIRLINES MIGHT GET PAID
Rather than lose business, airlines might actually see an
increase if they would get less grabby.
“Consumer self-service drives more transactions for sure,”
says Brett Proud, chief executive of GuestLogix Inc, which
provides technology that allows retail transactions on airlines.
Merchants may be willing to pay the connection fees for
passengers, and it will soon be common to see all sorts of
partnerships, experts predict, involving hotels, restaurants,
and transportation companies with last-minute inventory, or
companies dealing in duty-free goods or event tickets.
“There are entire businesses built around last-minute
everything,” Mann says.
Airlines are learning that if they don’t provide passengers
with the ability to purchase something as soon as they think of
it, they’ll lose the opportunity, says Proud. “The impulse buy
is lost.”
(Editing by Beth Pinsker, Lauren Young and Prudence Crowther)
