Travel’s digital ‘gap’

You’ve probably read one too many stories about the digital ‘gap’ – the growing chasm between the wired and everyone else. This isn’t one of them.

Instead, consider a different kind of gap: the technological one between travelers and their airline. A recent column about electronic tickets prompted some of you to ask about the emergence of a kind of digital divide between passengers and carriers.

Let’s go straight to the debate. In the story which covered efforts to offer tickets and boarding passes you could print yourself, I asked if you preferred e-tickets to paper tickets.

For Mike Smith, there’s no question about it. While waiting for a recent flight to leave from San Jose International Airport, the reservations system crashed. More than a dozen e-ticket holders were left stranded by the glitch.

“My paper ticket was as good as gold,” he remembers.

But other air travelers aren’t so sure about pulp’s superiority. “I really like the advantages of no tickets to lose or to remember to bring to the airport,” says John Thomson, a frequent traveler. “However, the inability to use an e-ticket with another carrier is very annoying. This is particularly irritating when there is a delay or other disruption in service.”

What does all of this have to do with technology? It’s got everything to do with it.

Ever get the feeling that while travelers are quick to embrace the latest technology, the airline industry is often the last?

Don Baird does. “The airline IT systems I see are archaic, using dumb character-based terminals tied to large 70′s style mainframes,” he complains. “Today, boarding passes on many airlines are still hand-counted by the boarding agents. A few airlines use boarding pass scanners, but not many. Airlines in general seem to use so little new technology compared to other travel companies.”

Although it’s true that some forward-thinking carriers, such as Northwest Airlines and Alaska Airlines, have made well-publicized efforts to narrow the technological gap between them and their customers, the fact remains that most airline technology is mid- to late-20th century issue, at best. Even United Airlines’ recent announcement that it would install high-speed broadband radio frequency technology at its airport lounges effectively represents a microscopic improvement.

The legacy systems used by the airlines are an apt metaphor for the way most carriers run their businesses: from the top down, slow to innovate, unable to change. To retool the hardware would be prohibitively expensive, the airlines insist. Never mind how much it would cost to not upgrade the technology.

Airline Web sites are a powerful case-in-point for the digital divide. The eye candy that the newest sites serve Internet users is no more than a clever way of masking the outdated technology that powers it, if you can be generous enough to call that powering. Behind the markup lurk computers that are older than most of the wine in my cellar.

Anyone who has even the foggiest notion of how airline yield management system work must see the irony. Carriers are unwilling to spend the kind of money it would take to bring their systems into the 21st Century, yet they hire armies of rocket scientists who develop the most sophisticated programs designed to squeeze every last dollar out of the business traveler.

Meanwhile, the very road warriors who are then forced to spend $1,200 on a transcontinental roundtrip ticket must stand at the counter for ten minutes while the ticket agent patiently hunt-and-pecks her way through what must be one of the most counterintuitive reservation systems known to humankind.

Has anyone ever bothered to ask business travelers how much their time is worth?

There’s a gap, no question about it. Talk to Scott Margolis to see how wide it’s gotten. He’s used American Airlines’ new check-in system, which let him slide his frequent flier card in the normal boarding pass reader, with results that are alarming.

“The major drawback seems to be that American has not trained its personnel all that well,” he observes. “Since I have now bypassed both the ticket counter and the check-in gate, the person manning the machine has to ask the two ridiculous security questions and push the right two buttons to effect the printing of the receipt. Most times I push the buttons for them and tell them what they are supposed to ask me while I show them my picture ID.”

The gap affects our travel in ways we may or may not be aware of. Waiting at the ticket counter, on the phone, at the gate, may be the most obvious (and annoying) symptom of travel’s digital divide.

But there are other consequences. Travelers who log on to an airline Web site only to get stuck in random strands of useless information, inflated fares, and bloated code, are victims of the gap. Passengers who get stuck at the airport because they were holding a ticketless itinerary are also casualties of the gap. So are travelers who must navigate the maze of lines at the airport: a line to check in, a line at the gate, and a line for an upgrade.

Most road warriors are as tech-savvy as they come. They’re armed with several wireless devices, a laptop loaded to the hilt with the latest software, and more spare batteries than a hurricane shelter. They’re ready to travel ticketlessly. They’re prepared to do business electronically. They are the epitome of wired.

It’s up to the airline industry to give itself a major upgrade – and close the gap.

What do you think? Is there a gap between passengers and carriers when it comes to technology? What should be done about it?

Christopher Elliott is the author of Scammed: How to Save Your Money and Find Better Service in a World of Schemes, Swindles, and Shady Deals. Critics have called it “eye-opening” and “inspiring” — it’ll “grab your attention and won’t let go.” Order your copy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes.

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