the experience of airlines, before you get anywhere near the airport

I stumbled across this guy, who designs websites, and got so angry with his poor experience on the American Airlines website, he critiqued it, redesigned it, and sent them a letter about it. He's a smart guy - he rightly points out that we're at the point with marketing and technology that a poor website design, that does not provide for easy navigation, usability, and sale of services, is beyond useless, but detrimental to a company; it not only limits revenue possibility, but damages the brand.

As a part of my job at the NCTA, I book airline travel for our contract staff, up to 70 flights for a single event. Airlines prices are way down this season - fewer people are traveling for vacation, fewer companies can afford to have employees travel for business. It's not a good time to be an airline.

Curtis points out that "new, young, and innovative" airlines like JetBlue and Virgin America gain repeat business and thus market share by providing an "excellent customer experience."

What is the excellent customer experience? I might argue that once you're at the check in counter, and especially once you're on the plane, the service is all about the same. All the airlines pass out peanuts, and have equally educated pilots and polite attendants - no real difference there. The airline's only real chance to differentiate themselves is before you're provided the service - when you're making the ticket purchase, that is, when you're on the website. They differentiate themselves by how difficult or easy they make this process, and the emotions they inspire when the traveler is making a reservation. Do they feel calm and confident? Or stressed; bogged down with tedious search functions, nebulous options, and unclear pricing? This experience of booking a ticket may turn a consumer totally on, or totally off, to your brand (exactly as Curtis claimed it did for him). And consumers are both emotional and loyal - once they don't get a good feeling from your brand, or don't connect with it as a part of their identity, they'll quickly develop a disdain for it, and probably tell all their friends to do the same.

Who knew we'd come to a point where the actual product we're paying for is all homogeneous. It's the high or low quality of the free experience we get beforehand that determines which brand we prefer. This isn't always true - quality of actual experience certainly counts...sometimes. But more often, it's all in the packaging; the feeling we get when engaging with the company's image.