Out of the Pool!

Back when I first became aware of Uber, and the other ridesharing aps, I remarked in this space that the whole concept was something in which I would only consider participating if that were one of the demands made by terrorists holding my wife hostage. Even granted that these services have become extremely popular in some areas, the first-hand accounts of people trying to make a living driving for Uber sound worse than any job I’ve ever had, and the idea of hitching a ride with someone I don’t know has not appealed to me since a classmate of mine was murdered while hitchhiking forty years ago. But none of that really compares to the company’s new policy of kicking people off of its service if their “rider rating” drops below 4 out of a possible 5…

You can pick up the Business Insider article here if you’d like, but they’re usually reliable to be going on with. Uber instituted a two-way rating system a number of years ago, with drivers allowed to rate their riders as well as the riders rating their drivers. I’ve also noted in this space that this has resulted in at least some percentage of Uber users and drivers developing a “quid pro quo” arrangement – you give me five stars, and I will give you five stars” deals that effectively gut both parts of the system. This doesn’t appear to have prevented a number of problem drivers from remaining “employed” by Uber, although in fairness we should note that the number of driver-related mass shootings has gone down in the last few years. It also hasn’t, apparently, prevented large numbers of riders treating their drivers as badly as they do most other service workers…

It isn’t clear from this article if the company already has such an arrangement with the drivers, and I certainly don’t plan to start driving for Uber in order to find out. Originally, of course, the whole business model was supposed to be self-correcting: drivers who compiled a bad record wouldn’t get any riders, and riders who were unpleasant enough (on whatever dimension) would not be offered any rides. But with the aforementioned accommodations reached between drivers and riders, it would appear that the company has felt the need to take a more active hand in managing the actual rides it sells…

Now, admittedly, I have no experience with Uber in either role, and no clear information on what effect (if any) being banned from using the service for six months at a time would have on the behavior of habitual riders. But as someone who does spend his working life dealing with anonymous rankings in a system where there is no verification of the complaints being made or appeal for inappropriately bad feedback, I can’t imagine doing business with a company (or its “driver partners”) under conditions where anyone who wanted to could give me a one-star ranking based on my appearance, political affiliation, favorite sports team, favorite food, alma mater, city of origin, city of residence, country of origin, age, height, weight, religion (or lack of it), profession, or reluctance to pay them off in return for a better rating…

Whether this new policy will have any impact on the problems Uber is trying to fix, whatever those might be, remains to be seen, of course. I’ll let you know if I spot any follow-up on this story, but for the moment, the idea of being kicked out of the ridesharing participation pool without warning or chance for appeal for whatever inappropriate (or dishonest) reason somebody feels like dreaming up isn’t making me any more likely to consider using their service…

Borrowing a Vacation

I’m still not sure how I feel about the article in Market Watch about new services that are offering to allow people to finance vacations. That’s fair, I suppose, because I’m also somewhat ambivalent about the business transactions they’re talking about. Paying for things on credit – charging airline tickets and hotel fees on your credit card, for example, and paying them off once you get home – is a fairly normal part of travel these days. In fact, post-9/11 it can be almost impossible to purchase a plane ticket, rent a car or even reserve a hotel room without a credit card. Credit card interest being problematic isn’t news either; unless you are going to pay off all of your bills in full as soon as you get them, the interest can very quickly become a bigger problem than the things you purchased in the first place. But throwing a new form of consumer lending into the mixture just makes the whole subject even more confusing – and I don’t think the linked article is helping as much as they think it is…

The attraction of financing a vacation – assuming that you have the option of paying for it in some other fashion – is said to be that there are no hidden charges or fees involved; you know exactly what you are going to pay upfront. It is also apparently possible, depending on where you want to travel (and, presumably, your credit score) to obtain lower interest than you can usually get from a credit card company, which could be a major savings. The reason for all of the qualifiers in this post is that they also occur in the article. All of these conditions appear to vary depending on who is traveling, who is paying, what terms they want, how long they will need to pay off the trip, and what level of credit card interest they already have…

Confusing things even further is the fact that the Market Watch reporters bring up the idea of low-interest introductory rates, special deals, loyalty club and credit card rewards programs, and other limited opportunities that can, but won’t necessarily, reduce the cost of the vacation and/or the cost of the financing enough to completely change the financial implications of the situation. Some of these may be practical – financing anything at a special deal of 12% makes more sense than using a credit card to do the same thing at 28% interest – but not all of them are. In particular, applying for a credit card solely because you want to purchase something expensive during the three months you have a trial low interest rate is asinine unless you can pay off the entire trip in those three months. And if you can do that, you’d almost certainly be better off taking the trip three months later and just paying it off as soon as you get back…

The point I’m getting at here is that it isn’t clear from the article whether these programs are actually lower-cost consumer lending options or are just programs that make money on people who are unable to understand their credit card agreements or on people who are bad at math. All of the examples of other ways to finance your vacation that appear in the text struck me as one-off, specialized, unlikely, counter-productive, or just ways you could try to game the system that will almost certainly turn out for the worse. It’s possible that you could get a better interest rate from a company that just makes vacation loans than you could get from your credit card company, but if your credit is sufficiently good to do that you could probably just get a better credit card rate or a short-term bank loan that would do the same things for much less; that’s how consumer credit works…

Lounge in a Box

Once in a while I will come upon a story in the online news sites that sounds good at first look, but which demonstrates a more hopeful world view or greater faith in humanity than I have left at this point. Despite what my critics might imply, I don’t believe that all people are terrible, or that if it is possible for members of the general public to steal and/or destroy something for their own fun and profit that everyone will do so. The problem is that in many cases it only takes one bad actor to ruin everything for everyone else. I’ve often summed up businesses that failed because of the work of a limited number of bad actors with the expression “Another beautiful idea – ruined by people.” This was my first reaction to the CNN story about small, private rooms that can be rented by the hour being installed in airports…

The company behind this, which calls itself Jabbrrbox, claims that these cubicle-sized rooms can be used to provide a quiet space in which to place phone calls, get some work done, or speak with others in privacy, much like a very small, private airport lounge. The company also claims that these are more cost-effective than executive clubs offered by airlines, although at $10 for 15 minutes and $30 for a whole hour this is only the case if you are planning to use the Jabbrrbox unit for fewer than 15 hours per year (American Airlines’ “Admiral’s Club” is $450 per person per year, for example) or fewer than 2 hours in a visit (a one-day pass for the Admiral’s Club is $59). It also lacks the concierge service, refreshments, business services and other amenities one would find in a conventional executive club. It does, however, offer greater privacy – which I can’t help thinking is going to be the biggest problem…

At the moment, the Jabbrrbox units have a clear door panel, but the company is talking about equipping future units with a privacy screen, and even if they don’t, anybody could block the panel with a handful of printer paper and a spool of scotch tape. I’m not suggesting that people are going to start using the cubicles for drugs, sex, or contraband, just because they can. I’m saying that people will already use any relatively secure or temporarily private space for all of those purposes, and I can’t see anything that would keep people from doing the same with the Jabbrrbox compartments. Again, I don’t expect everyone to turn one of these cubicles into a drug den or a brothel, but it wouldn’t take more than one such bad actor to put an entire bank of them out of service…

That seems unfortunate, since this is a potentially useful service, and they’ve already got to deal with more common criminal activities like vandalism, credit card fraud, and a significant chance of squatters, including customers who will refuse to leave when their time is up and drunks passing out on the floor. I’ve written extensively in this space about how difficult it can be for an entrepreneurial start-up business to survive, let alone flourish, but in this case the company is going to have a lot more to deal with than the capitalization, cash flow, and customer development/marketing issues that will destroy more conventional businesses…

Now, I would be the first to admit that I don’t have any hard data on how much crime still goes on in American airports, any more than I know what percentage of air travelers are destructive nihilists or ugly drunks. I also have no idea what measures (if any) Jabbrrbox has in place to deal with the objections I’ve pointed out in this post. It’s entirely possible that I’m just being too conservative, pessimistic, or traditional in my assessment of this company’s long-term prospects for success; it’s also quite possible that the company has already got all of this figured out and are just waiting for clearance to start installing these private lounge units in airports all over the world. I’m just saying that whoever came up with this idea has a higher opinion of the general public, or even of air travelers, than I do…

They’re Everywhere!

So I’m getting into the line at the Hertz counter to pick up my rental car, when one of the employees working the floor tells me I can do all of that using one of the kiosks. Looking around, I notice a line of small machines, a little smaller than a bank’s ATM, each of which appears to include a touch-screen computer interface, a second monitor mounted at about eye level, and a telephone handset like the one on an old-style payphone. After a moment, I realized that there was a video camera mounted just below the upper monitor, like you sometimes see in a teleconferencing or video phone setup. The line in front of me was about 20 people, and there were only four live agents working the counter, which struck me as a rather silly way to spend an hour or more, so I decided to give the kiosk a try. I walked over and touched the “Start” icon on the lower screen…

It took a few minutes, but eventually the upper screen lit up, showing me the face of a woman and a nametag that gave her name and said she was working in the Oklahoma City call center. The conversation went about the way renting a car usually does, including the agent on the monitor trying to sell me on various upgrades and add-on services that I didn’t need (this wasn’t a driving vacation, it was a business trip, and I don’t need GPS navigation to find my way around the city in which I grew up). The kiosk had a card-reader which proved capable of reading the magnetic strip on my Driver’s license as well as the one on my credit card, and after a few more attempts to enhance my bill the printer built into the kiosk came to life and spat out my rental car documents. All I had to do was go find the numbered parking space the agent on the screen had mentioned and drive off…

I didn’t really have time just then to start interviewing my rental agent – and it can be really difficult to get someone to answer your questions when they can just press a button and disconnect your video call. But from what the agent told me the company maintains a very large call center at their Oklahoma City complex, and the agents working there may find their workstation linked to a Hertz kiosk anywhere in the world as needed – presumably assigned according to the language choice selected by the customer when they log into the kiosk screen. This means that instead of having a large crew of rental agents standing around in each airport and rental location waiting for customers to assist, the company only has one large group of rental agents standing around in the middle of North America, who can help our wherever they happen to be needed at the moment. With a couple of extra shifts this one call center could take care of customers in rental locations all over the world, all without leaving their cubicles…

Now, I’m not sure this idea would work in all industries. Most companies with equivalent business models have either build completely automated systems – telephone and website – that allow the customer to take care of his or her own business as desired, or have retained live personnel at their customer service locations, or occasionally both. The airline I was flying that day, for example, handles all of the check-in and seat-assignment tasks using automated kiosks, but has live agents standing by (one for every five to twenty-five automated terminals, depending on the location) to handle anything too complicated for the automated system. Since those duties do occasionally involve handling or moving baggage, an agent calling in from a remote location couldn’t handle them. But there are any number of other businesses that could use such a system…

I suspect that as telecommunications systems (and bandwidth) become cheaper it will become economical for more companies to use this sort of remote live agent system. Whether this is ultimately good for the customer, or for the employees, remains to be seen. But there is something appealing about the idea of a team of customer service representatives being stationed at every company location in the world simultaneously…

Lack of Imagination

I was reading a case on the Consumerist website last week about someone who had booked a hotel through Hotels.com in Croatia, only to arrive at the address specified and find no trace of a hotel. By itself this wasn’t a complete business failure; the company does not own any of the hotels it offers to book for you, and their site has plenty of disclaimers about what happens if they book you into a hotel that is unavailable on the day you’re supposed to check in. Where the situation became truly farcical – and what led to the inevitable mockery by thousands of scruffy bloggers as well as everyone who visits the Consumerist site – is that when the failure was reported to them, Hotels.com had no procedure in place for verifying the existence of the hotel, getting the customer to a different property for the night, refunding the booking fees, or anything else that might have satisfied the customer and defused the situation…

As a result, the customer wound up being put on hold for hours at a time while the company insisted that the hotel in question really existed, even though no one there ever answers the phone. This would be asinine enough if the customer had just called in and questioned the transaction from home, but Hotels.com was actually doing this while their patron was standing in front of the abandoned building, reporting the lack of a hotel being present. And while the customer did eventually get their money back for the booking that didn’t exist, they had to spend hours fighting with the company, and have still not been compensated for the International cell phone call they made on the night of the dud booking when they were trying to find the non-existent hotel…

Now, I’m not suggesting that this one lost booking is going to hurt the company; it’s quite possible that even the Internet mockery that has resulted and all of the hundreds (or millions; it’s hard to tell) of net citizens who will never do business with Hotels.com will have no effect on the company’s fortunes. But if this sort of thing keeps happening it will eventually harm the company’s reputation beyond any hope of the new series of animated cartoons being able to gloss things over, and eventually the company will destroy itself (and all of the people who work for it, sell things to it or own it) simply because whoever is running operations is not only too lazy to verify that all properties listed not only exist but respond to their customers, but also too lazy to train the customer service personnel on how to handle such a crisis…

Consider, for example, the steps it would take to deal with this sort of situation. Assuming that a toll-free number that works all over the world is outside your budget, simply giving your customer service people the ability to call someone back – and the authority to do so – will cut off both the International on-hold problem and the attendant costs (and demand for reimbursement). Having a policy of checking on the existence and quality of hotels you work with would cut down on the number of non-existent properties you book; so would having contract language that specifies how long your business partners have to respond to your calls – and the penalties they will pay if they don’t. And it certainly wouldn’t take much to develop relationships with back-up and substitute properties, so that if all else fails you can divert abandoned customers to somewhere that does exist…

If none of those things are possible (or economically viable; I don’t know how much tourist traffic goes to Split, Croatia in a given year), then at the very least you could have warnings on your website and disclaimers in your contract language regarding hotels in parts of the world for which you can’t guarantee performance – or, in extreme cases, existence. This won’t stop the occasional problem from slipping through the cracks, or keep the occasional lazy or stupid customer from looking in the wrong place for their hotel property, but it will go a long way towards ending this type of mistake and its attendant Internet mockery…

Of course, the key measure to take is giving your customer service personnel the ability to handle such cases in the first place, as well as the tools to do so. But that’s a discussion for another day…

That’s Disgusting!

Anyone who has ever stayed overnight in a hotel or motel has probably experienced a moment of disquiet on walking into their room for the first time. In a high-end facility it’s easy to convince yourself that the Housekeeping staff has laundered every piece of cloth in the place and sterilized everything else until you could do surgery on the coffee table or assemble electronic components in the sink. But even those exceptional cases you know for a certainty that hundreds, if not thousands, of strangers have slept in the same place in which you’re about to, and in middle-price and economy properties you’re counting on the efforts of a single hideously over-worked and under-paid employee to take care of everything in the measly amount of time the company allows per room. It’s almost enough to make you want to take a black light and inspect the room – and, if fact, Best Western has started doing just that…

A story running today on the CNN Travel page explains that Best Western International has just announced a new cleaning program that will include ultraviolet sterilization procedures for just about everything in their rooms that can’t be washed, comprehensive washing of everything that can be washed (not just sheets and towels but pillows, blankets, and so on) for each new guest, and the use of black light inspections to detect “biological matter and other particles.” The company insists that its facilities have always been this clean, but since the technology now exists to guarantee that every room meets their standard every time, it’s only sensible to deploy the equipment. Pilot projects have demonstrated that this program adds significantly to guest satisfaction for a minimal increase in operational costs…

What makes this initiative interesting in a business sense is how much value it adds for the customer relative to the cost incurred. We’ve talked in this space about attempts to add value in hotel properties that do nothing of the kind (e.g. business centers and restaurants that are not open when needed) or that actively subtract from the value of the room (wi-fi services that cost extra, complimentary breakfasts that a diabetic can’t eat, etc.), but one of the universal requirements of hotel guests is that the room (and its contents) be clean, or at least clean enough to use without anxiety about what previous guests may have done there. If Best Western’s new "I Care Clean" program can increase their customer base by even a single percent it should pay for itself in a matter of days, if not hours, and there’s no telling how much business it might generate from improved customer relations…

And who’s even mentioned the potential savings in Health Department fines that will be avoided by the new cleaning and inspection program yet?

The whole idea behind the “value added” strategy is to increase the value provided for the customer at the lowest possible cost to the company. If Best Western can provide rooms that are cleaner than you would find at a Four Star hotel for a fraction of the cost, they have an excellent argument for why you should give them your business as opposed to any competitor. If they can do so at minimal additional cost to themselves, they should also succeed financially. Of course, just buying the gear isn’t enough; they’ve also got to train the Housekeeping staff to use it – and make sure that local management follows through. As with most value added programs, it’s not enough to just say you’re implementing one; you have to actually produce the value when the customer arrives. But this one seems like it might be worth keeping an eye on. And if you own a business, you might consider whether you could try a similar approach…

You Make the Call

There’s been a lot of ink over the past week about the response Carnival Cruises (the company that owns the giant cruise ship that ran aground off the Tuscan coast) to the accident and the demands from both the passengers and the public that they do something about the situation. The company has apologized for the incident at length; they’re blaming the captain for the whole situation, and offering to refund the cost of the trip and all expenses incurred while on board the ship. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be enough to satisfy some of the passengers, who apparently feel that the company owes them something more than just a refund for endangering their lives. The question of what the company does owe the passengers will be up to the courts to decide, but from a business standpoint the question is what should the company offer the passengers – and can they avoid additional trouble by doing so?

First off, the company can’t really expect that the refunds are going to be enough; their initial offer of 30% off on any future cruise would be asinine if that was really going to be their final position, but I think we are justified in being skeptical about that. The fact that the passengers really were in danger of their lives is hard to deny, given that at least a dozen of them were actually killed in the accident; it’s also hard to deny that the company was to blame for the event, since they hired the captain and gave him command of the ship. I don’t know if Italy has strict liability laws like the ones in the US, but even if they don’t it’s going to be very difficult for the company to claim that they had nothing to do with the wreck. And even if the company could defend all of these actions and walk away scot-free, they shouldn’t – because that effectively sends the message of “screw the customers, we don’t care if a bunch of them die and the rest have to abandon ship, we’re looking out for ourselves!”

I don’t pretend to know a lot about the cruise industry, but the concept of value added applies here just as much as anywhere else, and the number of technological innovations or management breakthroughs available is going to be limited. If you’re going to add value to a ship’s cabin, you might be able to get something out of larger rooms or better furniture, but it’s more likely to come down to how well the cabins are cleaned, how good the food and other services aboard are, and how good the customer service provided is. And none of that is going to matter if potential customers are convinced that the company is going to throw them to the sharks – either figuratively, in the sense of ignoring their claims, or literally, in the sense of letting them sail on ships that could be crashed onto a rocky coast because the person at the wheel is an idiot…

At the same time, the company can’t simply hand each passenger a blank check; they have a responsibility to their stockholders, not to mention their employees and all of the vendors and their people who will be out of a job if the company guts itself. Refunding all of the tickets from one cruise doesn’t sound like much, but with 4,200 people aboard, even a thousand dollars each takes us into multiple millions, and the company still has to worry about repairing the ship, assuming it can be repaired and also assuming that their insurance company doesn’t refuse to pay out on the grounds that the accident was human error, and the company should have known better than to give someone that careless his own ship. Add in the clean-up costs and whatever the Italian government decides to fine them for, and the company may not have the funds available to pay out much. And that doesn’t even consider how much revenue they might lose if people stop booking cruises over this incident…

Somewhere between a basic refund and a settlement package that will bankrupt the company is the optimal choice for Carnival in this situation. If the call was yours to make, how would you balance the needs of the company and your responsibility to your stakeholders with the needs of the customers and the need to maintain public relations and customer relationships? If you were CEO of the cruise line, what would your call be?

Worse Than That

Quick! What’s the worst thing you can imagine an employee doing with a large company asset that has nothing to do with his or her normal responsibilities? Sleeping or playing computer games while flying a commercial airliner has possibilities, and so does navigating a supertanker full of crude oil through dangerous waters while drunk, but both of those cases did at least involve driving the vehicle to where it was supposed to be going at the time you were supposed to be there. Sailing a barge into a major highway bridge because you weren’t paying attention, or derailing a freight train full of poison gas because you weren’t paying attention are both fairly egregious, but again, the employees responsible were at least on course, if not very conscientious. Opinions will vary, of course, but I believe the top spot has to go to a ship captain who wrecks a 1,000-foot vessel against the rocky shore of an island so that one of his crew can wave to family members who live there…

In case you missed it, MSNBC is running a story claiming that this is exactly what happened in the crash of a passenger liner off the Tuscan coast on January 13 of this year. It seems that the captain had decided to ignore the safety requirement of staying at least 500 meters (1650 feet) away from the coast of the island of Giglio, instead closing to about 150 meters so that the ship’s head waiter could wave to members of his family who live on the island. So far there are still 29 people missing in the wreck, and six bodies have already been recovered, making 35 deaths a genuine possibility. Wrongful death suits tend not to be quite as expensive in Europe as they are in the US, but this is a fairly extreme case, given that the accident was entirely caused by human error, and none of the people who perished in the crash could possibly have foreseen the danger or taken a reasonable action to avoid it…

There’s also a tremendous risk of environmental damage, as the ship went aground in the protected waters of a preserve for whales, seals and dolphins. Cleanup might not be quite as difficult as the operation following the Exxon Valdez incident, if only because the cruise ship has less oil to spill, but ocean clean-up efforts are never easy, and they only get worse in sensitive environments. This could easily destroy the entire preserve, as well as all consumer confidence in the shipping line. And we should probably acknowledge that the ship itself is worth somewhere on the order of $513 million USD all by itself, bringing the potential bill to $1 billion or more before the suing is done…

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that any of my readers (assuming I have readers) would do something as monumentally idiotic as sailing a huge passenger ship (it’s the size of Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, or about 68 feet longer than the Titanic, if you prefer) into shallow, rocky water so that a member of the crew could wave to people on the shore. I’m not even suggesting that we, as managers, should take steps to ensure that no one who could be stupid enough to do such a thing is ever given command of a major corporate asset like a $500 million passenger liner; that’s just not something you’re going to turn up on a job interview or an annual review. What I am suggesting is that we, as managers, should never assume that none of our employees could ever be arrogant, stupid or short-sighted enough to make an error this horrendous while working for us. The people who run this cruise line thought that, too…

And you know that it is only a matter of time before someone does something even worse…

Something’s in the Air

I read with great interest a number of news stories over the past few days concerning the volcano erupting in Iceland, and how the disruption of air travel over half of the world has led a number of hotels to jack up the prices they are charging stranded travelers. All in all, I’m not sure what I find more appalling: the lack of long-term customer relations strategy I’m seeing, or all of the comments you tend to find on such stories by people who don’t appear to have the whole “supply and demand” thing down yet. Although I suppose we should probably start by admitting that the whole situation is going to end up making somebody look bad, no matter what you do…

First of all, there have been a number of stories online about hotels raising their prices by as much as 400%, since they know the stranded tourists can’t just leave. I’m always a bit skeptical of such stories, because unless the city in which they are happening is alleged to have more transient passengers than hotel rooms in it, such things are pure nonsense. If a given hotel were to raise their nightly rate by 400% it’s much more likely that some competitor would take advantage of the situation by only raising its rates by 300%, or perhaps 200%, than it would be to follow suit; within a matter of hours the entire market would be competitive again. Unless we are talking about relatively small cities, places unaccustomed to high volumes of passenger traffic, or places where a monopoly on hotel rooms by one firm or owner exists (all of which are problematic for other reasons, too), this situation is unlikely at best…

But for the sake of argument, let’s suppose that there is a place somewhere in the world affected by the volcano where every guest room in town is already rented, and the hotels are all charging everything they can get away with charging. Let us further suppose that you own a hotel there, and you know that you can rent the room that just opened up for $400 USD per night this week. Why would you offer that room for $200 USD? Are you supposed to take a 33% cut in your profits just because somebody’s flight was cancelled? If so, should you make less money on your rooms EVERY time somebody has a flight cancelled? What about people who were just late getting up and/or too hung over to clear security in time, and wound up missing their flights; should you subsidize them, too? What about weeks when there’s a convention in town? Should you intentionally cut profits just because demand for your rooms is high?

Granted that in the case of an extraordinary situation, where tens of thousands of people are being affected in dozens of countries, it’s probably worth it in long-term goodwill to avoid gouging your customers for every dime you can get from them; it’s probably better not to hand your competition the opportunity to double their normal prices and still undercut you by 200%, if it comes to that. But all of the people out there in cyberspace who are wailing and gnashing about the cruel, heartless capitalists who are making money on a scarce resource by selling it for whatever the market is willing to pay for it need to take a moment and ask themselves if strict governmental control, international treaties, armed vigilante justice, or whatever other measures they’re advocating would really result in better travel experiences from the ones they’re having right now…

Large-scale experiments in Russia and certain other countries suggest that we’re better off the way we are. But that’s probably cold comfort when you find yourself with the choice of paying for another night in an expensive hotel or sleeping at the airport…

Too Bad

There’s been a news item swirling around the Internet for the past week about a new venture that combines extreme sports with big game hunting for the chance to do something more disturbing than most people will ever imagine: pirate-hunting cruises off the horn of Africa. The story goes that a group of Russian entrepreneurs got their hands on an unwanted cruise ship, outfitted it with lots of extra lights to make it easier to locate at night, and hired a bunch of ex-special forces troops to be the security detachment. They will then take passengers on a cruise up and down the Somali coast at about 5 knots, trolling for pirates. To make this more interesting, passengers will have the option of renting a variety of firearms by the day, with ammo provided at cut-rate prices. They promise that the ship will be attacked by pirates, or your money back. Alas, if only it were true…

Even a quick glance over the web site put up by this alleged business should tell the reader that there’s something fishy going on. There’s no contact information, no way to communicate with the “company” whose site you’ve located, and no way to order anything from them. In fact, there’s no information about the company, the people behind it, or even the boat you’re going to be riding on. There are also a few other minor points – the assault rifle ammunition is priced at less than 20% of what actual ammo for those weapons would cost, and the .50 caliber ammo is priced at less than 10% of what that costs; the legality of such a venture is highly questionable; how on Earth would they get financing for this, let alone insurance? – but none of these are quite as immediate as the question of who in their right mind would take these chances with either pirates attacking an un-armored, unprotected target like a cruise ship, or a bunch of un-trained civilians with automatic weapons and grenade launchers running around on their boat?

Some of you may remember a similar Internet business hoax from a few years ago, called Penguin Warehouse, which also purported to be an actual online business selling live penguins direct from Antarctica (and other points south where they have penguins) but was actually just an exercise in website design. Here again, the hoax became obvious when you realized that there was no way to contact the company or give them money, which would rather defeat the purpose of having an e-commerce site, if you think about it. The fact that the United States and most other countries have strict laws about importing exotic animals and owning one, none of which were even referenced by this site, would just have been confirmation. Which didn’t keep thousands of people from being disappointed when they realized this site was a hoax…

Personally, I’ve always been amazed that someone doesn’t try using sites like these as part of an Internet scam, like the famous (I hope!) Nigerian bank scams. All you’d need would be an off-shore account and a PayPal set-up, and you could easily take “deposits” for pirate-hunting cruises, live penguins, or any number of other things that people would be so delighted by that it wouldn’t occur to them to doubt the legitimacy of the company until it was too late. Of course, there are a lot of Internet scams that function exactly that way already, and it’s probably only because the Nigerians don’t really understand the American mentality that we haven’t seen more of this sort of cyber-crime. Which means that as soon as this story percolates to some of the seamier parts of the Internet, we probably WILL start getting spam about pirate-hunting cruise offers…

Maybe I’ll invest in some of that new anti-spam software – or even the companies that make it. From where I’m sitting, it looks like the demand is about to pick up…

Kids, Stay in School!

Seriously, I mean it: stay in school! What kind of school isn’t really important; if you like plumbing or drywall better than math and liberal arts, then by all means, find a good trade school and stay in that. Given the crumbling infrastructure in this country, having more people around who actually know how to build things, fix things, and keep things running smoothly would be wonderful, and it’s much easier to get the really good jobs in any field if you know what you’re doing. On the other hand, if you don’t, you might be faced with having to dress up as a Smurf and travel around the world advertising costume sales…

A story being reported this week on the Daily Telegraph website tells the strange but true story of Ian Tomkins, an employee at a costume shop in Newbury (England) whose employer decided to buy a huge lot of Smurf costumes from a manufacturer in China. Unfortunately, while there as a market for a few dozen Smurf costumes in Newbury, 500 of them was a bit much for this small business to move. So the owner decided to have Mr. Tomkins travel around the world in a Smurf costume and have his picture taken in front of various international landmarks. Which he then did…

Now, I’m not saying that getting paid to travel around the world on business with no duties or responsibilities beyond having your picture taken isn’t a good gig, all things considered. Nor am I criticizing the business itself (or the owner) for attempting such a stunt. It turns out that there are apparently thousands of people in Europe who like dressing up as Smurfs, and apparently all of them are now buying their costumes from the shop in Newbury, which has placed several repeat orders for bulk Smurf costumes, selling them by the thousands. I’m just saying that, all things considered, when the time comes to determine whether you have the job of wearing the Smurf costume around the world or the job being the guy who orders someone ELSE to wear a Smurf costume around the world, I know which job I’d going to pick…

Probably the ultimate case of this syndrome appeared before me a few years ago, when I was working in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. I was driving between survey assignments (long story) when I noticed a guy dressed up as a submarine sandwich standing on a street corner handing out flyers for a nearby Subway shop. At the time, my job included scaling the outside of apartment buildings without a safety line in order to check their line-of-site for microwave signal repeaters, but there were still three reasons I preferred my job to the sandwich guy’s job: 1. I got paid about 6 times what he did; 2. It was 106 degrees, and he was wearing about 45 pounds of heavy, shaggy costume, and 3. two small kids kept trying to kick him in the backside…

I’m not saying that he’d have been better off staying in school; a lot of people with college degrees can’t find work at all, and I’ve actually had jobs that were worse than that even since I’ve had a Master’s Degree. But you’ve got to admit that if you want to avoid wearing a stupid-looking costume in public and actually get paid a living wage, dropping out of school probably will not help…

Go With the Cat

I’m not sure how many of you follow this sort of feel-good news on the Internet, but the story of the stationmaster in Japan who is actually a cat hit about a year ago. It seems there was a station on a Japanese light rail system that decided to adopt a cat as a mascot to improve customer relations. So they chose a tortoiseshell cat that had been born next door and lived around the station, made her an honorary stationmaster, and produced a cat-sized version of a stationmaster’s cap for the cat to wear. It was cute, and it did in fact both improve customer relations and bring some much-needed favorable publicity to the failing rail line…

A few years later, the cat’s station was converted over to an automated facility because the line was losing money, and all of the human personnel were transferred to other locations, but the cat stayed on (as cats are wont to do) – still wearing her cap (as cats are somewhat less wont to do). The rail company apparently figured that people in the area would go right on feeding the cat, and people who rode the line would go right on enjoying having the cat there, so why mess with a good thing? The cat became the only remaining employee of the station, and no one thought anymore about it. That is, until the traffic on that rail line started to pick up…

According to the story being reported on ABC News Online, approximately 55,000 additional passengers used the light rail line in 2007 alone – specifically to travel to the automated station and have their picture taken with Tama the tortoiseshell. This has resulted in an estimated $10.44 million US (about 1.1 billion yen) flowing into the local economy, just for fiscal 2007, with an even bigger impact expected this year. Of course, part of the effect is being attributed to the children’s books and other tie-in merchandising about the cat, but it’s still rather a large impact for an animal mascot to have on a local economy. Apparently the Japanese like cats a lot more than anyone realized…

Now, I’m not suggesting that your business could duplicate these effects just by “hiring” a cute animal and dressing it up like one of your employees. People in the US don’t have quite the same attachment to anthropomorphic animals that the folks in Japan have, and are unlikely to travel out of their way for a photo opportunity with one, let alone an actual animal dressed up in human costume. Animals of various types have been used as business mascots for decades in North America, and no one is likely to think there is anything particularly amazing about a bookstore cat or a library cat, to take the obvious examples. Even more to the point, most businesses in this country will have health code issues if they keep a live animal on the premises. It’s the principle that we should be looking at in this story…

Adopting a cat and equipping it as a stationmaster didn’t require a lot of money or time, and yet this change in the routine was enough to catch the imagination of the rail line’s customers and bring them flocking to see her. Eventually, it was enough to catch the imagination of the general public and bring people from all over the country to see her. So I have to ask you: is there something that YOUR business could do to cut through the clutter, attract attention, and maybe even improve your relations with your customers? Something that might put a friendly face on your operations (even if it’s a cat’s face) and make people want to come and see you? You might want to look into the idea…

Surprise!

I'd like to think that, in general, I'm a pretty good sport. I don't believe in the type of practical joke that destroys property or actually harms people, and if I'd been on the jury in the case where some idiot decided to give someone with a severe peanut allergy something containing peanut butter, I would have been voting for conviction for Murder in the Second Degree (under the Depraved Indifference statute) -- that's not funny. But in general I'll put up with most things, and I think I'm relatively good at laughing when the joke is on me. Or, at least, I did think so until we got our most recent cellular telephone bill...

Now, it's important to realize that my wife and I didn't set out to become AT&T customers in the first place; we had quit AT&T years ago because of their substandard service and baffling billing and gone with Cingular, only to end up back with AT&T when they bought Cingular out from under us. We were about to switch to another provider when AT&T bought them, too, and in an effort to keep anyone else from losing their jobs (or their companies) as a result of AT&T pursuing us, we just gave up. Fortunately, the influx of personnel from all of these other companies seems to have been a good influence on the AT&T core personnel, and their service and performance have been improving over the past few years. And the fact that they are nation-wide comes in handy when we travel, which is a good thing when you are relocating across the country...

So imagine our surprise when our first bill arrives in East Lansing for more than 3.5 times what we had been paying, more than half of it in "roaming charges." Fortunately for us, there's an AT&T Wireless store less than a mile from our new house, and we went down there the following day to ask just what in heaven's name was going on. This proved to be rather more involved than we had expected, because the people at the store didn't know either. In fact, when we showed them the bill they appeared to be as appalled as we had been ourselves; they agreed that they're a nationwide company and none of their current contracts include roaming charges. They had to get on the phone and call their own corporate customer service to try to find out what was going on. Which, of course, we could have done ourselves, but were hoping to avoid by just showing up in person and asking our question...

So we watched the AT&T guys sit on their own voicemail system and listen to their own recorded voice telling them how important their call was, a somewhat surreal experience that would have been a lot funnier under other circumstances, but wasn't bad even so. After a few whiles, they were able to determine that despite changing our coverage four times, our phones three times and our address twice, the computer still had us on our original Cingular calling plan, even though they'd been billing us under an AT&T plan (and rates) for at least 4 years at this point. Our original rate plan hadn't been with a nationwide network, as there were no such things in 2001, and had thus included roaming charges. No one present, including the person from Bangalore who was on the telephone with us, had ever seen such a thing before...

Our story may end well, however. The AT&T guys agreed to back all of the roaming charges off of our account and make sure that we don't have any more of them. They also transferred us to a cheaper calling plan that will bring our monthly bill back into a reasonable level, and explained how to go about exchanging our California telephone numbers for local ones (which we'll probably do next month after making sure that everyone had our new land-line number here in Michigan). I can't fault the AT&T guys at the AT&T store; they were handed a potato that was not merely hot but was in fact (metaphorically) radioactive, and they handled it with dignity and professionalism. Even the call center agent from Bangalore was very nice and helpful...

But I'd still urge any of you who are thinking about relocating or even extended travel to go check on your calling plan before setting out on your journey...

Travel by Blue Screen

I was watching ESPN the other day, and I noticed what has to be the most efficient travel operations method I have ever seen. The network is featuring a series of commentary programs supposedly transmitted live from each of the various NFL training camps around the country as the teams begin gearing up for the 2008-2009 season. Basically, the program consists of two on-air personalities sitting in director’s chairs at the edge of the practice field while the team works out, and chatting about the personalities that make up the team and the prospects each team has for this season. The on-air people claim to be visiting one camp per day, as they move randomly about the country…

I became suspicious of the whole thing early on, when I realized that the program wasn’t moving from one camp to the next nearest one; instead, they appear to be lurching about the country at random, from New York one day to Los Angeles the next day to Indiana the next day to San Diego the next, and so on. There’s no question that ESPN has the resources to actually charter a private jet and send two of their on-air people (plus their entire support crew, camera crew, and entourage) on jaunts like these, but it seemed a highly inefficient use of both money and staff time. This opinion was reinforced when I realized that neither of the two talking heads on the show was interacting with any of the people at the training camps; all of the “local” team interviews had been taped earlier or were part of press conferences held at some other time…

It wasn’t until they had the continuity malfunction that I caught onto the scam, however. About a week into the program the two on-air guys were starting their conversation for the day, when a couple of people started walking across the field behind them. Despite being behind the commentators, the two people walking were clearly closer to the camera than the men in front of them (e.g. they were larger and in better focus). That’s when I looked closely and realized that the two commentators were actually sitting in front of a blue screen; they weren’t actually at the camp, but rather were being digitally superimposed over the live feed…

I suppose many other sports fans (and television viewers) would have been offended by this trick; at the very least, they might have resented the network assuming that they (the viewer/fans) would be taken in by this simple trick. My reaction was quite the opposite: I thought it was the most brilliant idea I had heard in years. Since ESPN already has a camera operator or two covering each team (or at least has one based near enough to go and get some footage when needed), all they had to do was have one of their people in the field set up a camera on a tripod somewhere near each practice field, and then have two of their people sit down in front of a blue screen on the set in their broadcast center. No travel expenses, per diem, or even extra salaries involved…

Now, I’m not saying that every company could get away with this sort of thing, or should even try. In each of the ESPN “Training Camp” broadcasts, the commentators spent most of their time reviewing tape, playing interviews and game footage, showing pictures and diagrams, and generally discussing media other than the footage being shot of them at that moment. In point of fact, it really would not have made any difference at all if they had gone around the country and set up their broadcast set at each training camp, or if they’d just gone to the Bahamas and done the whole broadcast as a voice-over using their satellite phones. Most business travelers who are spending the company’s money and their own time traveling around the country for business have some concrete reason for actually going where they say they are going in person, and a conference call or videoconference is not always going to cut it…

Still, if your company needs to cut down on its travel expenses, you could always look into having your people try traveling by blue screen…

Fly vs. Drive

Since we’re on the road today anyway, let’s take a moment to consider the ages-old question of should we fly or drive to our destination? Back in our salad days, when gasoline was under $1 a gallon and you could get on an airplane with as much bottled water as you wanted (without taking off your shoes, belt, or undergarments in the process), the trade-off was simple: flying was faster, driving was cheaper. Thus, if you needed to get where you were going quickly, or if your idea of a fun time does not include days of highway driving, you would fly to your destination; otherwise you might drive. But under the current conditions, this is no longer a given…

First, let’s consider the trip we’re currently on. It’s about 2200 miles from LA to Lansing, or about 34 hours of road time at 65 mph; this does not, of course, include time for food, refueling or rest stops, let alone sleeping. If you’re willing to drive for 17 hours a day you could do it in two days, but most of us would take four. If we assume $150 per night for hotels and 20 miles per gallon of gas (both optimistic under present conditions), we are talking about at least $950 for the trip, not counting food or other needs. We should probably allow another $300 or so for routine maintenance on the vehicle, since 2200 miles is most of a service cycle, and this will be hard use (2200 miles in four days). Allowing for food and other necessities, it’s going to be somewhere on the order of $1,400 to make the trip…

If I’m traveling alone, this does not compare well to the $309 I’ll pay for a ticket with 2 stops (Las Vegas and Chicago, for example) or even to the $825 I’ll pay for one stop in Chicago. It doesn’t even compare well with flying to Chicago and renting a car for the rest of the way. If I’m traveling with a companion, however, it would be at least $600 and more likely $900 to fly with 2 stops, and $1,700 to fly with 1 stop – no longer a clear advantage to the airlines. And if I’ve got three people with me, it’s going to be at least $1,400 to fly, and more likely $3,200 – advantage car. Although flying is still faster…

Now let’s take a shorter example. It’s about 680 miles from East Lansing to New York City; a drive that will take all day (about 10 hours+) and cost about $150 in gas, and let’s say $100 in repair costs. If we fly through Cincinnati (there are no direct flights to or from Lansing to either coast) the cost will be $242, and the trip will take a bit over 6 hours – if the planes are on time. But this time factor does not consider having to be at the airport 2 hours before your plane leaves, or the time it takes getting from East Lansing to the Capital City Airport (10 minutes) or the time it takes getting from JFK to Manhattan (90 minutes or more). If I’m by myself, the price difference is a wash; if I’m traveling with anyone the car trip is significantly cheaper, just as you would expect. What is bizarre is that with the common delays in air travel and the need to change planes, the car trip DOES NOT take any longer…

Even worse, from where I’m sitting (which today is the driver’s seat of a Pontiac Torrent), is the surcharge we would face getting all of this cargo onto an airplane. With most U.S. carriers now charging extra for each checked bag, we’d be looking at another $300 to $900 in fees, assuming they’d let us check this much baggage in the first place, which they probably wouldn’t. This might not apply on a weekend trip to see my folks in New York, but it would definitely apply to the voyage we are currently undertaking…

The bottom line is that even the current gas crisis has not changed the equation all that much. It’s still cheaper to drive, and in the post 9/11 landscape, it isn’t always faster to fly, either. Which would make me feel a lot better if the price of gasoline wasn’t still rocketing up…

Adding Value

It seems like I’ve been on the road a lot over the past few years, which is odd when you consider that none of the jobs I’ve held recently involved travel – at least, not officially. But between teaching, consulting, personal travel, family obligations, and the cross-country odyssey my wife and I experienced in sending our daughter off to college, I’ve driven and flown well over 20,000 miles in the last six years, and stayed in enough hotels that I’m starting to have trouble keeping them straight, and in the process I’ve seen a huge range of efforts to add value to what would otherwise be a nicely-decorated prison cell (e.g. four walls, a roof, a bed and a toilet). Some of them work, some of them don’t, and some are so lame that they bear repeating…

First off, let’s start with the in-room amenities. Other than a bed, a desk, at least one lamp, a telephone, and a chair, what can you add to a hotel room that won’t defeat the purpose (e.g. require raising the room rate)? Well, most hotels offer a television set and cable TV these days. Some offer free premium channels (HBO or whatever), and some offer pay-per-view movies (adult and otherwise), but it seems that basic cable has become almost the baseline standard; if you check into a hotel that does not offer at least CNN, The Weather Channel and ESPN, you’d probably be disappointed. In-room video games might be a bonus if you are traveling with children of the right ages; Internet access using the TV as the monitor (which I’ve also seen) can be great for people who don’t like to lug their laptop with them on vacation.

Adding a data port to the telephone in the room does not take much effort, and is great for everyone who still has a dial-up modem in their laptop. A high-speed connection takes a bit more effort – but not that much more, especially since the hotel probably has one already; it’s just a matter of running cable to the rooms. Business travelers will prize a desk large enough to actually work at, and a good desk chair; families might also find it useful. An in-room coffee maker is useful for business travelers and anyone else who can’t function until they’ve had their first cup in the morning, but I’d rather have a fridge, myself. Even on vacation, I’m more likely to keep soft drinks in the fridge and make use of a microwave (if there is one) than any other features. Frankly, a mini-bar just isn’t the same; I’ve always had to move everything around to make room for my stuff. And I’m not sure the profits you can make from selling drinks and snacks at mini-bar prices are actually worth the cost of stocking one, the hassle of making sure your customers actually pay for what they use, and the problems that occur when the kids get into one…

Oddly enough, a second telephone in the bathroom is one of the most useful additions I’ve ever had – not that it comes up that often, but when you’re working (or traveling alone, for whatever reason) it’s nice to be able to get the phone easily. When you’re traveling with a companion, one of the more useful things is a second sink – one in the bathroom proper, and one outside it in the dressing area, so that both of you can get ready at the same time. Bathrobes don’t do much for me, and neither do complimentary beauty aids, but in both cases, I appreciate the effort.

Of course, all of this assumes that the room itself is clean, well maintained, and free of any other problems; if the window is stuck, the sheets are stained, or the room comes with free pets (of the multi-legged variety) it’s not going to matter what kinds of goodies you’ve got available…