Iberia Express update

Just a quick update on my previous post about Iberia Express where I posted a link to what looked like the new airline's livery. Today Will Horton has tweeted the following picture that confirms the simple mainly white livery of the "new" airline.

With this livery Iberia is possibly wishing to highlight the fact Iberia Express is a "lite" version of itself. I must say I am unimpressed by this design, however this approach might make sense if what you are willing to sell is an unexpensive, basic product stripped out of all unnnecessary extras. Finnair recently moved also to a mainly white livery, although for a different set of reasons.

How Air New Zealand drives innovation in the airline industry: lie flat in economy class

In this video you can see how Air New Zealand's Skycouch works

Great innovations often come from small things, and this is what Air New Zealand has achieved with its Skycouch for economy class. This idea, that emerged from within the company, is going to make the very long flights to and from New Zealand significantly more comfortable for many travelers that can not afford the luxuries of business class (or even those of premium economy).

On the kiwi-airline's new Boeing 777-300ER you can turn a row of three seats into a comfortable couch.

How this is done?

Very simple. The seats come with totally retractable armrest, while the leg-rest can go up to fill the gap between your own seats and the seat in front. Each row of three becomes a single, almost flat, surface and there are even specially adapted seat-belts. Add some real pillows and you are all set!

This innovation is ideal for couples and families with children...the only if is that you have to buy the three seats together. Pricing can be a delicate thing, specially if you do not want to devalue your premium products (premium economy and business class), but it seems that Air NZ has finally gone for a pricing structure where you can buy two seats at full price and the third one at half price. According to this article, this could result on an extra cost of $1,400 on a typical trip from Auckland to London (based on base fares), however it will still be considerably lower than premium economy or business class seats, that go for about $6,000 and $10,000 each (let alone buying two of them!).

This is in fact one of several imaginative solutions that Air New Zealand has devised to improve its passenger's in-flight comfort...it is not a coincidence that when Airlinetrends.com designated the World's 10 most innovative airlines, Air New Zealand came on top!

You just need to look on a map where New Zealand is located to understand a lot of things...necessity is the mother of invention!

The American Airlines website design fiasco

Here is a story that I came across that should be compulsory reading, not only for everyone with an interest in airlines and web design, but also at business school courses and MBAs.

To summarize: an American Airlines customer, with an eye for web design and usability, visits AA.com and doesn't like what he sees, he posts his opinion on his blog, and here comes an AA.com webdesigner commenting on this post to let him know that if American Airlines website sucks is not because they have bad designers, but because corporate culture and internal politics and rules do not let them do their best.

The result: the American Airlines worker that posted the comment was fired (I am sure Seth Godin would be appalled to learn that someone that cares so much about his work got this sort of treatment from his employer), the story went viral on the internet, with the subsequent damage to to AA's corporate image).

At the end, AA.com got a face-lift (although not sure Dustin Curtis is now happy about it, given he had his own ideas about how it should be)

You can read an account of the story here.

The new Allplane Blog is here!

Those of you that were already regular visitors of the Allplane Blog must have noticed the scope of the change. Yes, after some months in the net, operating with a very basic template and configuration that delivered less than optimal upload speeds, the time has come to unveil the new design of the Allplane Blog!

But the change is not merely aesthetic, besides the new functionalities that have also been added and the enhanced connectivity with other blogs and social media platforms, this is just the first step in the project to make of Allplane a much more rounded and comprehensive platform for all those in love with the world of commercial aviation and air travel.

Watch this space!

The cabin design revolution

First it was the news that Ryanair and the Chinese airline Spring Airlines were evaluating the use of a sort of "bar stools" in their planes, in order to optimize space use in their aircraft. We can give credit to Ryanair for implementing bold ideas, so we might find them in the planes sooner than many think...but in the meantime other proposals for new cabin lay-outs are coming up. In this article you can see Design Q's idea of short-haul flying. I personally do not like the fact that you would be seating with the window at your back. I know many people do not care about having a window seat but I am probably not alone in finding that watching through the window one of the highlights of any flight, specially when arriving for the first time to certain country or city. This would still be possible with this proposed layout, but I have the impression it will be considerably more uncomfortable than in the classical layout, for example one of the weak points of the, otherwise outstanding, Virgin Upper Class is that the seats are also giving their back to the window, so anyone willing to look through the window must make formidable contortions or resign himself to follow the flight path in the video guide. In any case, and for those interested in this topic, I recommend this interesting New York Times article from 2006.