App in the Air, improving the global traveler experience, one app at a time

Flying is one of those experiences that can be at the same time exciting in a positive way, particularly if you are an aviation enthusiast, but at the same time exhausting and exasperating because of all the procedures involved (getting to and from the airport, waiting times, delays, etc.). The availability of connected mobile devices, and particularly tablets, has done done a lot to alleviate and improve the air traveler experience either on land or on board.

It is reviewing this type of apps and sites that from time to time I come across a true gem, this is the case of my latest discovery during my stay in Moscow:

App in the Air, an application (for now available on iPhone) that aims to make the most of your flight experience.

In short: App in the Air provides you a tool kit to manage your plane trips, you can  track your flight status (check-in, boarding, gate/terminal information, delays), get tips about the airports you are flying through (where to eat, how to connect to Wi-Fi, etc.) and chat with other passengers (to share taxi from airport or find out whether security line is long and you should arrive at the airport in advance) and, in line with the "quantified-self" trend lets you keep organized records of all your flying activity.

Of course you can get this type of information through other apps and sites, but what I think makes App in the Air stand out is the nice and functional way in which all these practical features have been combined. Plus in addition to an elegant interface it has some nice details, such as notifications when there is just a certain amount of time left before check in or boarding.

I played with the app for a little while and as I liked what I saw I took advantage of the fact that I was in Moscow to meet with Bayram Annakov, of the team that developed it. What follows is a short interview with him:

Q: How did App in the Air start? What's been your story so far?

Bayram: It all started with a geo-location chat Squeek which we developed in 2011. After we launched it we've found out that our primary user base are chatting in airport rooms, so we decided to focus on this particular segment and make an app for them. This is how App in the Air was born. We raised $150K investment from the Russian venture capital fund imi.vc in August 2011 and launched the app in June 2012. 

Q: Who is  behind App in the Air?

B: Currently, we have a team of four: Sergey Pronin, our genius programmer who is coding on different languages and platforms and is responsible for the whole development; Nikita Kosholkin, our business analyst, who spends most of his time analyzing user behaviour, measuring the effectiveness of product changes and proposing new ones, Kirill Zorenkov, our Designer who is all about making the user experience as smooth as possible, and me, Bayram Annakov, responsible for product management and business development, but sometimes coding together with Sergey.

Q: What are your main markets?

B: Business & leisure flight travelers in English-speaking countries who have iPhones are our primary markets, though we plan to expand to new geographies (Asia - 5 times growth for the last 10 years) and to new platforms (Windows Phone and Android).

Q: How's been the market and user reception so far?

B: We have launched the app in June, 2012 - since that time we have 60 000 downloads (January, 2013), we got featured by the media: we are among Business Insider's 100 Greatest Apps and also Gizmodo UK Essential Apps of June to name a few... 

Q: Any anecdotes you might wish to share?

B: Do you know the most popular tip for Chicago Airport? "Don't forget your son Kevin at home. He'll most likely have to fend off burglars on his own." (a reference to the Home Alone movie!). 

Another one is that we had a user who made 90 flights in last four months (almost 1 flight a day!) and helped us find a bug that we hadn't even thought about. We decided to release a special "Limited Edition" version for him with a special badge on app icon to show our gratitude for all his help! :) 

Q: What is your long term vision for your project?

B: We want to be #1 source of official & unofficial information for every traveler to make his/her experience less stressful. We want to achieve it by flight alerts, tips & chat (users can actualy send questions via live chat to the App in the Air team) and by crowd-sourcing flight information from our users in addition to using official sources of flight information. 

We want to be the ultimate App in the Air.. and before the air! :)

Spinning-off

And indeed, the future looks promising, riding the wave of success the App in the Air team is preparing to branch out and develop some of their most popular features into stand-alone apps for all those travelers that don't need a comprehensive travel management tool but are looking to sort out only specific parts of their travel experience...stay tuned because we'll revisit App in the Air in the near future for sure...!

Russian airlines round-up (2/2/13)

 Aeroflot: a perfectly fit 90-year old

This week marks a remarkable anniversary for Russian airlines: on 9th February 1923 Aeroflot, the former Soviet flag carrier and still the largest airline of Russia, was founded.

Yes! that means the dean of Russian airlines is turning 90!

Although Aeroflot has had its ups and downs, as its history is inevitably linked to that of its country, there are few airlines in the World that have such a long history of continuous operations.

Its image might not have fully recovered yet among the Western public after the chaotic late-Soviet and post-soviet years, when everything seemed to be falling apart...but today's Aeroflot is a totally different beast: new aircraft, levels of service on a par with the major international airlines, membership of Skyteam and even a website with a really cool design and truly innovative user interface!

If you wish to see more of Aeroflot's history, the Huffington Post has posted some very interesting pictures of Aeroflot's 90 years of history!

On unrelated news, a Russian airline that is unlikely to get to 90 is Red Wings, that has just seen its air operator license withdrawn by Russia's aviation regulator, Rosaviatsiya (Росавиация). This measure was already expected and follows the accident of one of Red Wings Tupolev Tu-204 at Vnukovo airport on 29th December. Five crew members died and three others were seriously injured, in addition to another person injured on the ground, when the Tu-204 aircraft hit a motorway just outside the airport perimeter.

For images of the Red Wings Tu-204 accident at Vnukovo airport, see this article on Russian daily Vedomosti.

Red Wings airlines was not a large airline, but was strong on some domestic routes such as that between Vnukovo airport and Makhachkala, in the Republic of Daguestan, in the Caucasus, where it had a 50% market share.

It is also uncertain what is going to happen with Red Wings' fleet of 8 Tu-204 aircraft. Those are among the latest aircraft to have been designed in the Soviet era and it is unlikely they are going to be worth much in the market now that most Russian airlines are opting either for more modern Western aircraft or for new-generation Russian aircraft such as the Superjet and the upcoming MS-21.

And meanwhile, in Russia's Siberian expanses, Yakutia Airlines took delivery of the first Bombardier Q400 airliner that enters service in Russia. The Siberian airline, that has three of the type on order, covers many regional routes in the sparsely populated Republic of Yakutia (also known as the Sakha Republic), the largest of Russia's regions. And in Russia, "large" means really "huge", because at over 3,000,000 Sq Km. Yakutia is more than 12 times the size of the United Kingdom!

Iberia, Vueling and IAG (continued...)

By the way, to clarify, my previous article was motivated by this piece on the FT that points towards IAG using Vueling to cover most of Iberia's short-haul network...

It makes sense on paper, but Iberia's unions have an agreement with the company that prevents Vueling from flying little more than a few routes out of Madrid...this adds to an already very tense labour situation at the Spanish flag carrier.

Vueling taking over Iberia's network?...not so easy...

  Too close for comfort

The more details that emerge of IAG's plans for Iberia, the closer we get to the scenario anticipated in this blog a few months ago (and see also this other post).

Why create a low cost carrier from scratch when you already have one in-house?

It would make sense for IAG (and British Airways) to roll out the Vueling brand across all of Iberia's short haul network...but it won't be easy: there are labour agreements in place whose purpose is to prevent exactly this from happening...so brace for more industrial turbulence on its way!

(Translation: I would check the industrial action calendar before booking any flight with Iberia in the coming months!)

Starbrook Airlines: spotted at a Moscow supermarket!

A while ago I wrote a post about my discovery of Starbrook Airlines...don't worry if you haven't heard of it or never seen one of its planes at an airport, because Starbrook Airlines only exists in chocolate!

Well, the news are...I finally managed to locate it in a real bricks-and-mortar shop...in Moscow!

So, if you happen to be in the Russian capital, you can get Starbrook Airline chocolate with its nice vintage aviation-themed packaging for the equivalent of 3.8 euro at Перекресток supermarket...

The comeback of the airline hotel?

I hope there's some more legroom than in their aircraft!

I have read that Barcelona-based airline Vueling has set up a joint-venture with Hoteles Catalonia in order to launch Vueling-themed hotels for its travelers. These hotels will be marketed under the "Vueling by HC" brand. The first hotel and test-bed for this concept will be launched in central Barcelona shortly and its design is going to be inspired in the fresh casual-looking style sported by the airline.

It is an interesting move, because, setting aside Easyhotel, which is part of the much broader Easygroup brand portfolio, airline hotels seemed to have fallen out of fashion in the last two decades...

It was not always like this, there was a time when every self-respecting flag carrier used to run its own hotel chain. In fact some of today's international hotel chains have been historically linked to airlines, this is the case of Swissotel (originally a joint-venture between Swissair and Nestlé), of Golden Tulip (linked to KLM), of Radisson (SAS), although most of these airlines withdrew from the hotel business at some point in the last decade, either forced by their financial situation or for strategic reasons.

Picture: Warren Long (cc license)

Sabena was one of the airlines with the largest hotel networks, often providing the top accommodation options in the African capitals covered by its network. In this picture, the Memling Hotel, originally a Sabena hotel, in 1970s Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (called Zaire at the time)

By the way, Sabena's Kigali hotel became famous after becoming a refugee shelter during the Rwandan genocide, in the events that were later depicted in the film Hotel Rwanda.

If we look back a few decades, to the early days of commercial aviation, when international hotel brands where not as widespread as they are now it possibly made lots of sense to offer a complete package to your regular customers (mostly businessmen and affluent people in those times) that might wish to avoid being exposed to variable service standards depending on the destination.

As air travel becomes more commoditized it might make sense to go back the provision of comprehensive travel experiences though, and who best positioned that the airline, that is often the first gateway to travel bookings...I just hope that the size of rooms and beds is not proportional to the seat pitch on their aircraft!

Analyzing Turkish Airlines route network

 Turkish Airlines is surprising us with new route announcements pretty much on a weekly basis: they are already the airline covering the largest number of destinations in the World and plan to increase this number to 300 by 2015...

Istanbul is, in a way, recovering its traditional role as a connector between East and West, a city that, quite literally, links different continents.

This is why I read with interest this Anna Aero report detailing, among other things, the traffic break-down on some of Turkish Airlines main European routes, both by type (origin and destination versus connecting) and by onward destinations of connecting passengers.

There are two things that I found particularly interesting:

1) Connecting traffic, although relatively high on all routes, as it is the norm for a global super-connector sucha s THY, was not nearly the levels where I would have expected it to be. On most routes there is roughly a 50-50%, 55%-45% split between O&D and connecting traffic, that proves that Istanbul and Turkey are in themselves a particularly large air travel market, a strong point in favour of Turkish Airlines in its quest for global leadership (wondering what are the figures for the Gulf hubs, but I have the feeling that is a lot less).

2) Some airports appear repeatedly among the main onward destinations of European traffic connecitng at Istanbul, there are three that stand out: BEY (Beirut), IKA (Teheran) and GYD (Bakú). Which means that Istanbul is a sort of World gateway for these points.

The case of Teheran might be explained by the political situation, which makes it unlikely that most international airlines will return to the country anytime soon.

In the case of Bakú, the situation might change a bit in the near future if Azerbaijan Airlines' expansion plans finally materialize (they even have a couple of Dreamliners on order).

But what happens with Beirut? I guess someone at MEA should be taking notes of this report...it looks like the market is there!