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

Here’s an excerpt from an article by Andrew Weir entitled Flight into Danger, 8/7/99, from New Scientist magazine.

So you think a jet plane is the safest way to get where you want to go? It ain’t necessarily so, argues Andrew Weir.

It’s that time of year again-the season of mile-long check-in queues, mysteriously delayed takeoffs and wandering luggage. Every day, all over the world, tens of millions of us will be joining those queues.

So many passengers, so many planes. And with air travel growing by about 7 per cent every year, more are on the way. No wonder airports are barely able to keep up. But at least we can take some comfort from the airlines’ assurances that the commercial jet is the safest form of transport ever invented, that flying is as safe as technology can make it and getting ever safer. Can’t we?

Unfortunately, few things in life are what they seem – and this is definitely the case with air travel. All right, so we may need some reassurance when we are stuck in a cramped aluminium tube surging at 900 kilometres per hour, 10 kilometres above Earth. But while working on a TV documentary series on air crashes and researching my book, I discovered that the reassurances we’re given are about as scientific as a belief in the curative powers of a rabbit’s foot. Take the claims about flying being the safest form of transport. If you plot the number of fatal accidents against distance travelled, you end up with 0.03 deaths per 100 million kilometres for commercial aircraft versus 0.1 deaths per 100 million kilometres for rail travel.

What the airlines don’t tell you is that this form of comparison effectively dilutes the accident rate for aircraft. Aircraft usually travel huge distances while cars and trains don’t. And while the risk of having a fatal accident in a car or train is spread more or less evenly across the journey time, the opposite is true for planes: 70 per cent of all aircraft accidents take place at takeoff and landing, which is only 4 per cent of journey time.

A better measure is to plot the number of deaths against the time travelled. This is fairer, since many car and train journeys last as long as plane journeys. But it still doesn’t take into account the concentration of accidents around takeoff and landing.

The most accurate method is to compare the number of deaths with the number of journeys made. So accurate, in fact, that this is the measure used by the industry and its insurers. This makes much more sense, because what matters to the individual is the journey, not how long it took or how far it went. Also, it enables comparison of different types of jet, both long haul and short haul.

By this measure, air travel takes on a rather different complexion. Deaths per 100 million passenger journeys are, on average, 55 for airliners compared with 4.5 for cars, and 2.7 for trains. Only motorbikes, at 100 deaths per 100 million passenger journeys, are more risky than aircraft on this basis.

Andrew Weir’s is the author of the book The Tombstone Imperative-The Truth About Air Safety available at the Amazon.co.uk.

SITA and Cambridge University researched. They found:

1) “location sensing via mobile devices could save airlines up to $600 million by tracking passengers, sending messages and moving them to gates more efficiently”

2) “by the end of 2010, 67% of airlines plan to offer mobile check-in. By then 82% of airlines also plan to offer notification services on mobiles.”

3) at “a trial at Manchester Airport in the UK, redemption of vouchers sent to passengers’ mobile phones resulted in 45% higher spending than among other shoppers.”

Sources:

ComputerWeekly.com

SITA

They go to Turkey, China, and Egypt!

Diagram from Travel.ru, thank you goes to Dasha for finding the stats. Number of tourists from Russia by countries (first 28). Blue is 2006, purple is 2002.

Noone could guess correctly. Once again: Turkey! China! Egypt! 1.4, 1.3, 0.9 million tourists a year. Then Finland!

Source: M-Travel 

Travel community TripAdvisor has launched three travel-focused social applications on MySpace.

According to a release, the applications, Cities I’ve Visited, Local Picks and Traveler IQ Challenge developed by Travelpod have been downloaded by more than six million users, and each provide the MySpace audience with unique ways to share travel information with friends, to challenge each other and to learn.