Wrong assumptions

There was several small streams that lead to this OpenJet project. I'm not going to go into details of all of them here, but focus on one of the main ones that lead to the primary focus of this project.

I have been in this industry for less than 1½ year, but already from my very first day I felt there was something wrong with the flight search sites I could find out there. They all felt dumb and inflexible.

So I kept coming up with ideas on minor things, details, that could be improved, but even then I felt there was something more fundamentally wrong. As even with small changes, the big picture could not be changed.

Far later I've realized this come from an industry ideology, or history, where the main focuses has been on the air carriers, the suppliers and the competitors. Never on the customers.

The customer seem to have been viewed as a dart flying toward the dartboard, with its ballistics pre-determined, eventually hitting the target, and the competition being about about taking up as much room on the target as possible.

I don't share this picture of the customers. The reason for Google being the most used search engine world wide is not because it has been massively marketed, it's because it does in a very minimalistic and accessible way provide some highly relevant results – quality.

So I eventually went on a big Travel Technology Show in London, where I among a lot of things went on a presentation by Peter Ballard from Foolproof, presenting the essentials of their Online Shoppers Survey Travel report. Very inspiring!

Suddenly I was sitting there with the scientific proof of what my intuition had been telling me for over a year. The very core of why the customers, site users, where feeling so frustrated. Me among them.

One other thing that hit me during that Show, and it was the mainstream of the whole industry. I brought this up several times with my working partner. To me it looked like a bunch of players fighting about the room in a corner of a wide open field. More interested in beating each other to it then exploring the rest of the field. I was stunned.

Time moved on and there was quite a lot of changes happening in the company where I was working, eventually ending up with Stephan giving me the opportunity and trust to launch and lead this OpenJet project.

I could write quite a lot about Stephan, but there is a few things that makes me respect him. One is his very humanitarian ideologies, be it employees or customers. Another is his interest in and perspectives on innovations being more important than successes.

I was now starting to get a good picture of what was wrong. Having their focus on the suppliers, most agents had made some fundamental assumptions, conscious or unconscious, that is simply flawed.

First a high knowledge is assumed by the customer. The customer is expected to have a good and proper idea of what product they want, where they wanna go and during what dates. Now looking for the cheapest ticket providing them that trip.

Another assumption is about the customer buying that ticket as soon as they have found the cheapest one suiting their needs.

None of those are correct. The normal customer have a very weak, or fluffy, idea about where or when they wanna go. Some know where they wanna go, but are very flexible about the dates. Other are just looking for “somewhere sunny for no more than 500€”.

Few, very few, are also buying their ticket on the first visit. With no site providing them with a solid feeling of providing the information they need, they are looking around on multiple sites, exploring a multitude of different options, trying to bring their fluffy idea down into something more concrete. Not rarely being highly frustrated about the spread of the information.

Once the initially fluffy idea has been transformed into a couple of alternatives they normally disconnect. Thinking it over for a while. Discussing it with co-travelers, when there is any.

Then they keep returning to the web for more information until they feel sure enough on their choice. Be it the second visit, or much later.

Those are the new perspectives we are trying to bring into the OpenJet project. Interviewing the customers rather than the suppliers, as the answers of the later ones are quite well known already.

I'm sure we will find lots of new user perspectives and inputs during this project, and I'm sure that we later on will find that some of our own initial assumptions where flawed as well, but by that time we will be open to change them. Because this site is meant to provide the user what he/she expects, not have him/her expect what the sites of today provide.

That's also where we want You in the process. And the reason why we try to find some time between the coding and reading to publish the process online, so that You can take part and give us Your feedback.

Because this time the site will be made for You.