How the new DOT airline rules will benefit you

Last week, the Department of Transportation issued a sweeping new set of rules expanding the situations in which airlines must provide compensation to fliers and requiring greater disclosure of fees and taxes.

• NEW RULES: Airlines must pay for lost bags, bumped flights

Here's a look at how the new rules will affect you, and my response to them:

1. Refund of bag fees if luggage is lost 

This is an absolute no-brainer and it's too bad the airlines had to be regulated into doing this. If you send something by FedEx and it's an hour late past the promised delivery time, you get a refund no questions asked. Disappointed that the rule doesn't include delayed bags — just lost ones.

2. Full disclosure of all fees on websites 

If you know where to look, most airlines have already done this, but the fees aren't all on one easy-to-find page. Ryanair in Europe actually has had this for years with a link showing all its fees clearly spelled out. U.S. airlines need to do this too. It will lead to better customer relations. All fees, including frequent-flier fees, bags, online booking, changes, pets, infants and whatever else should be clearly organized in one place. Whether they should be displayed at check-in counters is another matter — that would be a pretty big sign.

• AIRLINE FEES: What you'll pay for bags, ticket changes, etc.

3. Involuntary bumping payment increased  

Even $1,300, the new maximum, won't compensate someone who missed a $10,000 cruise, or forfeited a $5,000 vacation and missed two days of work plus other expenses. I would rather have seen some mechanism for passengers who incur enormous financial loss because of a bump situation to get compensated fairly. The good news is that relatively few passengers are involuntarily bumped each year (about 65,000 in 2010).

4. Tarmac delay rule extended to international flights 

Good idea, overdue. Airlines and airports are getting their act together and developing strategies to offload those passengers who wish to return to the terminal in the event of long tarmac delays. Remember, the rule does not say a flight has to be canceled. Just that you have to allow whoever wishes to return to the terminal the chance to do so.

5. Requiring taxes to be shown in all advertised fares 

This one seems unfair to me. Should restaurants now add the meal and or sales tax to all menu prices? Should the local electronics retailer include sales tax on their television ad prices? Hotels? Rental car companies? Why are airlines being singled out? We do think that any fare that requires a round-trip purchase be listed in ads only as a round-trip fare. But requiring taxes to be listed is discriminatory and will be a nightmare for the airlines (especially since some taxes vary depending on connecting city and routing).

6. What should have been in the new rules 

The list left off one regulation we need: compensation for schedule changes made long after you bought your ticket.

You buy a ticket in April; in October the airline tells you they don't fly that route anymore, but you can buy a new fare on another airline for three times the price or get your money back. No. The original airline should put you on the alternate airline at the same price you paid. Or perhaps you bought a nonstop flight, but the airline switches you to one making two connections at the same fare. No. A hamburger is not the same as filet mignon.

Another scenario: Your airline used to fly daily from a city, but service is reduced to 3 times a week. Five months after buying your fare and making land arrangements that are non-refundable, you have to buy two nights hotel at your own expense to wait out the next departure home. No. The airline should pay for the hotel.

Fliers, what did the new DOT rules get right, and what else do you wish was covered? Sound off in comments below.

Read previous columns

George Hobica is the founder of Airfarewatchdog.com. Airfarewatchdog features the best airfares on thousands of routes verified by a team of expert fare analysts.

http://travel.usatoday.com/experts/hobica/story/2011/04/How-the-new-DOT-airline-rules-will-benefit-you/46575920/1?sms_ss=twitter&at_xt=4db9c0fd5104a480,0

DOT’s Tweaking of Traveler Protections

By Scott McCartney

The new airline customer-service rules issued Wednesday by the Department of Transportation may sound like a lot of change but really boil down to small modifications of existing rules and codifying some measures that airlines have already adopted.
Perhaps the most impactful change for travelers is including international airlines in the tarmac-delay rule. We’ve seen some serious delays on international airlines – passengers stuck onboard grounded planes for 10 hours or so. U.S. airlines – faced with huge fines if they didn’t act – have largely learned to avoid long onboard delays. Now foreign airlines will have to do more to make sure they have gates and contingency plans for dealing with travel disruptions. They are subject to fines if passengers are left onboard a delayed flight for more than four hours.
The new rule also expands the number of airports where it would be in effect. Previously flights that were stranded at small airports were exempt. Now smaller airports, including airports to which flights divert, are included for domestic and international airlines.
Travelers should have the choice – wait it out or give up, go home or get on another flight, if you can.
Perhaps the least impactful new rule is the one getting a lot of headline attention – forcing airlines to refund baggage fees if bags get lost. The key here is that fees don’t get refunded if bags are simply late. You only get your $25 back if the airline never delivers the bag to you, not if it didn’t get on your flight or got sent to San Diego instead of San Antonio.
It can take many weeks for an airline to officially declare a bag “lost,’’ never to be found, and many more to actually get compensated for your losses. You may be out several hundred or even several thousand dollars (never check valuables!) in clothing and belongings, and you face a torturous process of trying to prove the value of lost goods to an airline with receipts. Airlines depreciate the value of goods lost and unilaterally decide what to pay you. The $25 bag fee is the least of your worries by the time you get through with the airline.
Bumping up compensation to involuntarily bumped passengers should further curb airline overbooking and make travel more reliable. It may also sweeten the offers airlines make to get volunteers to give up their seats.
The fee disclosure regulations probably won’t have much impact, however. By now, most travelers know most airlines charge baggage fees. Southwest Airlines advertising probably does more to educate the public on that than any regulation. Now airlines will have to tell you clearly that there may be additional fees like baggage, and make it easier to find the fees.
It can be difficult to click around an airline Web site to find actual baggage charges, often buried in sections with baggage rules. A clear menu would be preferable – if you want fries with your hamburger, the price of fries is on the same menu. Imagine if a restaurant just posted a notice that fries were an additional fee and you had to go somewhere else to find the actual price.
The DOT didn’t require airlines to include their customer-service promises in the legal contract of tickets, called the “contract of carriage.’’ That would have given travelers a way to take airlines to court when they didn’t live up to their promises.
The new rules do require airlines to let consumers either hold a reservation for 24 hours without a fare change or get a full refund within 24 hours. That’s actually something most airlines already do – most big carriers pledged to do that 10 years ago when they pre-empted passenger-rights legislation in Congress by voluntarily offering customer service protections.
It’s unfortunate the airline industry doesn’t seem to be able to step up on its own and treat customers more fairly, straighten out its service problems and be more open about its pricing. The DOT is trying to protect passengers, and airlines do respond when pushed by the government. Perhaps if the industry had more leadership and was more proactive instead of reactive, it wouldn’t have to come to that.

How to Turn Customers into Brand Ambassadors

 After I talked about the future of “search” in my previous article, lets now look at what a brand should do to win in the new “search” paradigm.

It starts with listening, a simple act in the digital world the importance of which is yet to be fully understood or appreciated. Listening to conversations about your brand or product or service offers multiple opportunities. If people are speaking well of you, you’ve an opportunity to convert them to your brand ambassadors. If they are speaking ill of you, thank them for helping identify an opportunity for you to grow and to resolve an issue in a way that turns around their perceptions and experience.
Don’t listen and you end up missing out on both opportunities above and you should be prepared to face a potential backlash from dissatisfied customers. For example, Vishal Rao, a frustrated customer of MakeMyTrip ended up creating a new site RuinedMyTrip.com to share his horrifying experience and it is prominent on searches for the company. For more on this, check out this Mint story.
Tools such as Google Alerts and TweetDeck do a great job of helping a brand listen to conversations about it. Once a brand has laid the foundation to continuously listen, it can embrace some or all of the opportunities of “social search,” some of which are below:
–Be present on relevant Social Media: Given that search results increasingly throw out more social media channels such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, SlideShare, and others, being present on these channels opens up new opportunities to be found by customers on search engines. Take a minute to search for your name on Google and observe the results. This article ‘Google will force all B2B companies to Tweet’ will help you further understand the importance of Twitter.
–Turn your satisfied customers into brand ambassadors: Given that potential customers want to know about your product or service through the people who’ve already used it, the opportunity of leveraging your existing customers to bring in more customers is unmatched. But how? There are numerous ways to do it.
Recently, LinkedIn launched a new feature called its “Company Page,” where any company can list its products or services. There is no reason you should not request your satisfied customers to share their feedback about you. At Digital Vidya, we’ve been continuously making the most of our LinkedIn Company Page to build credibility and generate more business. Similarly, you can request recommendations be placed on your LinkedIn profile.
Today, Twitter is one of the favorite platforms for consumers to share their opinions. The question is whether you can encourage and inspire your satisfied customers to share their views about you. You can then use the stream of positive tweets about your brand as testimony to attract new customers. For examples, 24hoursloot.com has integrated a Twitter stream into their website in the form of “true testimonials from real people” to boost conversion rates for every campaign, which drives traffic to their Web site.
Believe me, it’s also worth spending time in identifying and requesting some of your customers to blog about you. Let me share two examples from our social media workshops: Social Media Workshops in India: The one I endorse and Social Media and the ‘GURUs’
In addition to blogging, it doesn’t cost you anything to request your satisfied customers write about their experience about your brand on popular review sites such as MouthShut.com. Here is an example of another business for which we requested experts to review our products at JavaRanch, one of the most popular Java discussion forums.
Likewise, depending upon your industry, you will have enough avenues to realize the opportunity of word of mouth. Please remember, if you are listening, you may discover a number of satisfied customers, who otherwise gets missed.
While it’s important to acknowledge and encourage your delighted customers, it’s even more critical to take care of your dissatisfied customers. In the world of social media, nothing works better than making a public apology and taking responsibility of your mistakes. By resolving the concerns of your customers in public, you are likely to strengthen your relationship with your satisfied customers in addition to turning your frustrated customers into brand ambassadors.
CafeCoffeeDay has an interesting case in which they smartly recovered from a short-lived crisis by appropriately responding to their customers in a timely way. By publicly dealing with the situation, as MakeMyTrip is also doing, you show that you are doing your best to improve customer satisfaction.
I will be happy to answer any questions you may have on the tools and case studies discussed. Moreover, I invite you to share relevant personal experiences in the Comments.

Pradeep Chopra is chief executive of Digital Vidya, a leading Indian digital marketing training company. He also runs a digital marketing community on Facebook.  He’s reachable on LinkedIn and on Twitter @pradeepchopra. You can read his full mentor bio here.



http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2011/04/27/chief-mentor-how-to-turn-customers-into-brand-ambassadors/

Thanks to Naviatarie's New Skies, AirAsia considering frequent flyer program

I was going through old e-mails (Easter weekend spring cleaning) and was bemused to see an August marketing e-mail from AirAsia poking fun at reward clubs with jibes like "pardon me random rewards card" and "what are you looking at Mr Buy 5 Get 1 Free Coffee Card?"

Only a few weeks prior AirAsia X chief executive Azran Osman-Rani remarked at a Sydney conference that the AirAsia group was mulling a frequent flyer program.

"The way I would look at frequent flyer points is not necessarily the way other airlines have looked at it," Osman-Rani starts. Indeed, two years ago Osman-Rani told me he shunned the thought of a frequent-flyer program. Now technological improvements have created new propositions.

"What has changed is this new engine--the [Navitaire] New Skies platform--and the ability to have a more robust and powerful CRM engine," Osman-Rani says of the booking engine and customer relationship management. "You can now have a real relationship with individuals," Osman-Rani says.

For instance, in exchange for storing all of my trips in an account so I can eventually receive a free ticket, AirAsia could receive valuable marketing information about me, such as where I like to fly, what ancillary options I choose. Rather than spend money on open marketing, AirAsia could spend that budget on a reward tickets.

"Our success relies on our ability to find the right way of connecting and reaching out to people and being able to execute it in a very efficient way," Osman-Rani says. Indeed, as Flightglobal publication Airline Business remarked in a recent editorial, "Airlines will need to plough copious amounts of their ever-scare cash reserves into truly reaching their customers and understanding their individual quirks."

AirAsia has always been improving its implementation, but technical limitations have impeded, for all airlines, faster and more efficient marketing. That is a hurdle AirAsia has been working to overcome. Last year the carrier raised eyebrows when it said a minimal cost advertising campaign on Facebook let it cut back on print advertising. Now New Skies permits the carrier to take another leap.

"It's about being able to create a program because you can do tailored one-on-one marketing, track purchasing patterns, histories, create deals and structures for them," Osman-Rani says.

Many marketing e-mails I receive from airlines are constructed based on what I have told airlines: where I live and travel from and what regions and offers I am interested in.

If AirAsia follows through with its thinking, it will now be New Skies predicting what I am interested in, and alerting me to special offers. But for New Skies to learn about me, it needs to know who I am, and what better way to get that information than a frequent flyer account where all of my trips are stored.

This is also good news for investors. AirAsia becoming leaner helps return dividends. For prospective AirAsia X investors, if the airline knows its passengers better gets them to travel more, that fuels the high growth trajectory the AirAsia X IPO is focused on.

http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/asian-skies/2011/04/thanks-to-naviataries-new-skie.html

Handbook on Financial Planning

by Mr. Tan Kin Lian
For free distribution to consumers
31 March 2011

embedded viewer courtesy of: https://docs.google.com/viewer