I read an interesting piece of news today about how Alaskan Airlines and Horizon Air are resorting to mobile services, in an effort to retain customer loyalty. The mobile services that these two airlines are currently offering are designed for the iPhone, BlackBerry and Microsoft Windows Mobile users and are hoped to improve their passengers travel experience and convenience.

These new services will enable passengers to make changes to their reservations, access airport information and potentially purchase tickets. Passengers can also check their flight status information, flight schedules, flight alerts and check-in 1 to 24 hours prior to their scheduled departure. Furthermore, passengers can use their “My Trips” feature to view their itinerary, change their seats, check their upgrade status and add an Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan number to their reservation. (for more information check out www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/news/database-crm/5632.html)

I believe that the more savvy Airlines are finally beginning to realize that with so many carriers and options available to travelers, retaining loyalty and repeated visits are becoming harder to achieve. Brand loyalty has been replaced by price consciousness thanks to the proliferation of budget carriers.

At last years WIT conference an ‘expert’ in the travel industry said that to retain customers, airlines and hotels need to offer more than just refurbished toilets and renovated rooms. What is missing is that little extra service that makes passengers and guests feel special and cared for. Being an ArrivedOK subscriber, I think the expert hit the nail on the head. Its no longer enough to offer the superficial trimmings that most hotels and airlines think us travelers require.

Instead, what we are actually looking for is convenience, and the knowledge that you care about how we feel. If an airline or hotel offered me the use of ArrivedOK FOC for flying or staying with them, I would consider traveling and staying with them during my next trip. Its those little extras, the intangibles that make us feel cared for, and that is what retains loyalty.

ArrivedOK now passes geographical coordinates of the travel destinations from its database to Twitter, so every arrival tweet is now geotagged, enabling your followers to see on a map the place where you just landed and have additional context when viewing tweets.

Though Twitter website does not display geotags yet, the growing number of third party applications does, for instance, such popular clients as Echofon, TweetDeck, Seesmic. Examples of other location-based Twitter apps are: Happn.in and Trendsmap.

Enabling geotagging in Twitter

By default the geotagging service is disabled for Twitter users. This means that you have to opt-in to sharing your location and this can only be done through the Settings page on twitter.com.

Follow these links right now to enable geotagging in Twitter:

mobile – twitter.com/account/settings/geo
desktop – twitter.com/account/settings

How it looks like

Now your ArrivedOK tweets will be geotagged and marked with an icon of some kind, depending on what Twitter app you use. Clicking the icon will open a map for you – in the app window or in your browser; some apps display Google Maps, some use Yahoo.

See below the example of Arrivedok geotagging in TweetDeck client. Happy landings!

ArrivedOK – “The Personal Flight Arrival Tracker” – automatically tracks your arrival at airports worldwide and instantly alerts your friends and family by SMS, email, via weblogs and social media – right at the moment you turn on your phone after the landing.
Visit ArrivedOK: Website | Mobile site | Facebook | Twitter

What media air travelers choose to inform their friends and relatives about their flights, provided with a choice between SMS, email and social media? See our latest stats on that topic.

ArrivedOK is the service that notifies your designated recipients about your arrival to airports worldwide. ArrivedOK doesn’t do this by tracking flights, it does it by tracking your cell phone when you switch it on in your destination. Once it has been detected as on in the visiting mobile network the arrival notifications are sent out automatically. Users can choose how to send those alerts – by SMS, email, or via social media/networks.

And here comes the interesting part – what media air travelers choose to deliver their arrival alerts? Our latest stats say that despite all that social media buzz, people still prefer SMS and good old email. Perhaps because email notifications are free of charge at ArrivedOK, one might say, but that’s not the case: ArrivedOK provides all social media alerts for free too but they show dramatically lower popularity.

Here is the percentage of all ArrivedOK arrival notifications by media channels (March 2009 – January 2010):

LinkedIn is not included in the stats as we just integrated recently.

One thing could explain the popularity of SMS among our users – ArrivedOK text alerts are remarkably cheaper than roaming text tariffs, but that does not explain the lower usage of social media services, which are completely free.

We would say that Twitter is doing fine, Facebook is overrated, and Blogspot and LiveJournal numbers reflect the decline of blogging.

This is basically European stats as we don’t currently provide the service in the United States and China (though we’re working on it).

ArrivedOK website – http://www.arrivedok.mobi
ArrivedOK Partnership – http://partners.arrivedok.mobi

I just saw a TV news piece (UPD: and New York Times Travel wrote about it too) saying that new security measures on US flights require airlines to turn off maps on in-flight entertainment systems so terrorists would not know the airplane location.

This sounds ridiculous because, firstly, those maps are scarcely informative. Secondly, if a serious person is planning to blow an airplane in the sky over any particular point of interest, he probably knows the route by minutes, so he does not really need a map or any kind of location technology.

Now, think about the in-flight Internet. This is a service on the rise – American Airlines was going to launch it, and Virgin too – see http://blog.arrivedok.mobi/2008/06/25/internet-on-the-plane)? Will it be banned too for security reasons? Because if a passenger have an Internet connection and/or a GPS device he can easily detect the plane location.

I can easily imagine that much hyped (http://blog.arrivedok.mobi/2009/01/28/in-flight-calls-a-reality) in-flight mobile services like voice calls, mobile Internet, WAP, SMS can be banned too for similar reasons.

I can only hope that those travel restrictions will not affect our ArrivedOK Flight Arrival Tracker when it will be available in the US. Simply because its purpose is to track your mobile phone when you turn it on after landing and trigger the delivery of arrival alerts to your designated recipients. But who knows.

As probably many people out there, we at ArrivedOK are waiting for the premiere of Up in the Air -- a movie about “an emotionally disconnected air traveler’s pursuit of 1 million frequent flier miles”, as someone put it.

Release date: 25 February 2010 (Russia).

There’s another funny trailer here at YouTube, where the characters are sitting at an airport lounge, tossing their frequent flyer cards and asking intimate questions about each other’s air miles balance. Very romantic :)

Ryan Bingham/George Clooney: How much does your life weigh? Imagine for a second that you’re carrying a backpack. I want you to pack it with all the stuff that you have in your life… you start with the little things. The shelves, the drawers, the knickknacks, then you start adding larger stuff. Clothes, tabletop appliances, lamps, your TV… the backpack should be getting pretty heavy now. You go bigger. Your couch, your car, your home… I want you to stuff it all into that backpack. Now I want you to fill it with people. Start with casual acquaintances, friends of friends, folks around the office… and then you move into the people you trust with your most intimate secrets. Your brothers, your sisters, your children, your parents and finally your husband, your wife, your boyfriend, your girlfriend. You get them into that backpack, feel the weight of that bag. Make no mistake your relationships are the heaviest components in your life. All those negotiations and arguments and secrets, the compromises. The slower we move the faster we die. Make no mistake, moving is living…