Of hammers and nails

Imagine that you run an airline business.

Now that the ability to fly people to far away places has been commoditized you find yourself competing on price and ‘experience’. Not the fact that you transport people but HOW you do it is the lever by which you make money.

It is in this situation that offering food and drinks on the plane (and ever more luxurious cabins on elite tickets) are a main point of your concern. So much so that in your eagerness to please you have fully missed the point of what you were trying to do.

It reminds me of the old adage ‘to the man who only has a hammer, every problem looks like a nail’.

You see, on a recent flight that started at 22:15 (that’s 1015 PM for you Brits), I was surprised to be woken up at about 00:00 with the question if I wanted some hot meal or other. Woken up. Seriously. Now I don’t know about you guys, but I’m guessing that most of the people, most of the time, will have had their bloody dinner by then.

But no, in the parallel universe of cabin crews, 00:00 is a perfectly nice time to have dinner. And 05:00 is an equally acceptable time to have breakfast.

In stead of spending those 7 or 8 bucks on a pair of slippers, some decent sleeping pills and one of those nifty eye covers, airlines worldwide have decided to stick with their guns and serve the fucking meal. After all, that’s how you keep people coming back.

The lesson here is that you’re probably measuring the wrong thing (did I like the meal? Compared to what? A meal at another airline? No meal? A decent night’s sleep?) and that once your systems are in place to do one thing, it’s going to be pretty damn tough to change the routine and react.

But that’s no excuse for not doing it.