My Way or the Highway

American Airlines war with the web is a fascinating series of events. Nobody can argue that the web is the neural and circulatory network for the preponderance of businesses. Unavailability and inaccessibility are likely to be two deathly symptoms of a commercial entity headed for life challenging times. Now, when I hear about accessibility issues, I tend to associate them with technical or network failures. Something broke, or glitches or evildoers are driving the calamity. Not so in this case. This war has to do with how accessibility is managed. American has made a decision that they will set the rules of how customers can access them.
These days we can book travel through agents or travel departments, call the airlines directly, go online to their websites, or go with a web broker that enables comparisons across multiple providers. The last group, the brokers, enables a platform that increases customer choice by creating a dynamic virtual marketplace where carriers can go head to head for available seats. Here is where technical and commercial complexity is made invisible to the customer, but requires important choices and decisions between the carriers and the brokers. American has their proprietary ticket sales platform, “Direct Connect,” and has decided that brokers must use that engine if they want to sell American seats. It is pretty much a “my way or the highway policy.” Two giants of the online travel world have opted for the highway. Travelocity and Expedia no longer display American flights as an option to their shoppers, they have made the carrier non-existing. American is working with Priceline to team up.
I’m reminded that many years ago Pizza Hut had a “no delivery” policy. If you want our pizza, you come to our restaurant and pick it up. A family owned pizza shop in the Detroit area saw great opportunity in that “my way or the highway” approach to the marketplace and created what became the delivery giant, Dominos. If you call Pizza Hut today, they will gladly deliver.
Convenience is cool to customers. Choice is cool to customers. Time is cool to customers. Many will agree that Pizza Hut had the better pizza …. So what? Airline seats are not pizzas, nor is American alone in accessibility. Southwest ticketing is only available on their website and through agents, but not web brokers. Constraints to accessibility always have effects. Whether Blackberry in Europe or the Middle East, or Apple versus the world …. They have effects, often costly ones.
• How convenient are we to customers?
• Is having the better or only mousetrap enough?
• In a world where choice and options are increasing exponentially, will customers find what they want and need “on the highway”?
“Freedom is not being a slave to any circumstance, to any constraint, to any chance; it means compelling Fortune to enter the lists on equal terms.” Seneca (Roman philosopher, mid-1st century AD)