April 20, 2006
Easychangeyourticket
I hate getting up at 4am to catch the first flight down to London, but someone’s got to do it. Had a productive day’s business, wrapped up early, was dropped off back at Luton Airport in plenty of time to catch the earlier plane. As someone who normally only uses Easyjet for personal flights, I’ve never had the occasion to catch an earlier plane. In my head, I’ve budgeted that I’m willing to pay up to £25 to come home 3 hours earlier. I ask the lady at the ticket desk, “How much to fly back on the earlier flight?” “Free,” she says.
So it turns out that I had in fact bought a bundle of two things. First was an option to take a seat on my two booked outbound and inbound flights. (The tickets are options, because there’s no contractual mandate for me to turn up; I can stay in bed all day and choose not to exercise them.)
They also sold me a limited option to change my option! This isn’t in fact free; it’s included in the price. I can’t change to a flight on another day, for example, without a change fee. Thank goodness I wasn’t flying Ryanair, where they’ll surcharge you for oxygen costs if you breathe too hard.
Easyjet’s problem is that they didn’t market to me the fact that I was getting this second option as part of my ticket package. As it happened, they were the most convenient and cheapest option. But I could easily have gone down on several other routes available to me. They can’t get any pricing premium for the option unless I know about it up front! Today was just pure forgone incremental revenue to them.
The same thing crops up in telecom, where users are sold options and the option could benefit from additional marketing to increase its perceived value to the user.
One example is Vodafone’s Stop the clock promotion. It lets you make off-peak calls up to an hour and only pay for the first 3 minutes. As an improvement to the pricing of the sickly voice minute business, it’s quite good. It helps to segment out “information passing” calls from long-running social calls, proportionately taxing the former more. It offers something of no real cost — most calls remain under a minute or so, and the network capacity doesn’t need increasing. Plus there’s the benefit (to Vodafone!) of obfuscating real prices making price-comparison between operators harder. Most of all, you have to sign up for it (for free). You have to acknowledge you’re getting this value — the thing Easyjet messed up on at the marketing, booking and check-in stage.
You’re being sold an option, too, with this promotion. Vodafone’s pricing isn’t very competitive historically. In your inflated minute fee, you’re paying for the option to speak for an addition 57 minutes at no extra charge. Go over the hour (or change your airline ticket to another day) and you’re gonna pay. If you just offer a passive discount, the user doesn’t value it the same way.
How would you improve it? Well, Vodafone have long wanted to take more control over device design. So why not add the following feature. If you make a “stop the clock” call, and look at your call log, they will also display underneath the call “Stop the clock saved you £3.27”. It’s an entirely fictional saving, but re-inforces that value proposition. Or just have a 5-second post-call splash on how much the promotion “saved” you, with any key to dismiss it.
So don’t say there’s no mileage left in marketing innovation for voice. There clearly is. Oh, and be very, very suspicious of anyone who claims to offer “clear and simple” pricing — it’s almost certainly a fib to hide that they’ve made it harder to compare prices and understand what you’re really paying!
Welcome to the byzantine black art of voice minute pricing; the airlines have plenty to learn. I guess Bell did have a head-start over the Wright brothers, after all…
Posted by Martin Geddes at 10:10 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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'Most calls remain under a minute or so..'
Do you have some real figures for this? Are calls becoming shorter?
I don't have any concrete statistics but I seem to remember that several years ago it was more like 2 minutes.
Unfortunately your suggestion is not that much of a new idea, most billing systems already provide this capability but operators don't use it, except perhaps on the bill.
You can, of course, program the SIM card to rate the call and give you the cost, but that's what they did 10 years ago and now they all use IN, which is so much better (ahem).
The easy way would be to have the call log as a browser based app on the phone, but then you'd have the following:
'Stop the clock saved you 0.74, but viewing this information cost you 0.80'
Not sure what you are saying about staying in bed all day. If you miss the flight, you have lost the ticket and have to buy a new one.
But as regards getting earlier flight, EasyJet are great with this. I've often turned up early for BA and they want around a hundred pounds plus to switch me to earlier flight, but EasyJet do it free if space is available. EasyJet is good for P to P connections, but do not risk them if it is not P to P.
Plus I wonder how you are getting into central London from Luton?
Posted by: at May 5, 2006 11:20 AMAverage call duration was always touted as 3minutes. Slightly more for women, less so for men.
Posted by: at May 5, 2006 11:22 AM