App High, Down Low
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You need to get from Manhattan to JFK, JFK to Heathrow, and then transit into Central London. Okay… go! You won’t just need a flight timetable – you’ll need help navigating two huge cities and two hectic airports.
Using your smartphone to help you travel seems sensible, but trawling through your app store only ends in brain-ache: Instead of a fine wine, you’re offered dozens of vinegar varietals. What, then, would the ultimate travel app look and feel like?
Airline, airport, taxi and transit apps are all limited to narrow slices of information, and are unable to talk to each other. Too bad there’s no app to filter through the air travel apps, since there are many duplicate programs out there. Scott Hadfield, developer and technical co-founder of HelloPretty, laments, “Most of them tend to over-promise and under-deliver.”
Marc Baumgartner, co-founder and design director at Codename Design, sees this phenomenon a lot: “There’s a kind of conceit that it’s the first time an idea has been conceived. It leads to a lot of people wading into pretty crowded waters (or skies).” He says of some app developers, “People get myopic, they don’t step out of their own biases. It’s about people, not technology, but a lot of the apps out there are technology-focused.” The real question should be, what real-life problem does your app solve?
Delta’s revamped app shows not only flight time but seeks to triage passenger rage by showing lost-luggage and cancelled-flight status. Meanwhile, KLM has succeeded in giving us a clean user interface, but is still bound within its own small silo of information.
An ideal travel app would show flight status, while also alerting passengers to airport security delays or transit advisories. The user interface should be friendly to one-handed use so passengers can multi-task while putting their shoes back on. Baumgartner adds, “Sometimes I want to know what’s available near my gate. Do I need to get food before I go through security?”
Hadfield says, “I’ll never use an airline specific app, since I don’t have that level of loyalty to any one airline yet. Though I will search for flights on Kayak, I use the mobile app mostly for hotels.”
Baumgartner’s travel app of choice is Passbook, which comes pre-installed on the iPhone and does one thing: manage tickets. From that platform, other developers have designed and built add-on apps, which help the customer instead of continuing to saturate the market.
Hadfield, an Android user, wants an app to manage his myriad loyalty-card numbers: “When I get to the desk I can just load up my app and give it to them.” For now, Hadfield considers Google Maps his go-to travel app: “Even without a net connection you can still pre-cache maps of cities and navigate that way.”
While no single travel app will be ideal for everyone, a better one will recognize that modern air travel is about much more than whether or not a flight is on time.
See which airlines have the top ranking apps on page 50 of the August Marketing Issue.