Georgia On My Mind

A cautionary tale for those of you planning to take a trip abroad this summer.

If you follow my ramblings, you will remember that my eldest daughter announced that she will be getting married this autumn. The wedding to be held in Napa Valley, California.

As soon as the venue was confirmed, we rushed to find flight tickets to San Francisco. Given that Rosh HaShanah is about the same time, we figured we needed to get something booked post haste, before the flights filled up and/or the prices followed suit. Perish the thought that the father of the bride couldn’t make it to the wedding because he couldn’t get a flight.

Regrettably, the emotion of the moment over ruled common sense and, instead of doing our homework properly, we headed straight for the El AL site and quickly booked five tickets at what we thought were reasonable prices.

A few weeks passed then, yesterday morning, I was reading some blog entries about trans-atlantic flying and El AL in particular. I found an entry complaining about El AL’s pricing policies and referencing the fact that the writer had found Delta to be considerably cheaper.

Know what? They damn well are!

A quick check of the Delta website showed that I could get Tel Aviv to San Francisco for US$450 less per ticket! Whats more Delta would fly us all the way via Atlanta, Georgia in less time and without having to deal with a code share change of terminal to American Airlines at Kennedy (a well known nightmare). And, for reassurance, I also checked a few other airlines and even British Airways were US$300 cheaper than El Al!

We called El Al to check the cancellation fees – US$640 total for all five of us. Of course, they weren’t interested in trying to keep us. They could pocket the cancellation fee and resell the tickets at a higher price. So, we booked ourselves onto Delta and waved El AL goodbye.

Total saving US$1,500 even after paying off El Al.

If only we had looked before we leaped!!

And, a final note for the employers of all of you who are still allowed to enjoy the perks of Business Class Travel. British Airways has just slashed many of their Business Class fares by up to 40%.

Moral of the story: Just because you live in Israel, never book on El Al without first checking out the other airlines. If you do, you could well end up paying way too much for your flights.

Coffee Blues

Many years ago, I was talking with the Marketing Vice President of one of the larger US airlines. He taught me a very valuable business lesson that I have never forgotton.

“Always beware of the coffee stains”, he told me.

“Whenever one of our aircraft lands, a cleaning crew goes through to prepare the cabin before the next group of passengers board. They refresh blankets, pillows, remove all the garbage and clean the toilets etc.”

And then came his pearl of wisdom, “And, above all”, he continued, “They ensure that every drop down tray in the seat in front of you is clean. There must never be any coffee stains! If a passenger boards a “clean” plane and finds a coffee stain on his tray, it takes very little for them to wonder – if the airline can’t even get that right, how good is their aircraft maintenance?”

Coffee stains are all around us, every day of our lives. Today I encountered an excellent example which is the modern version of his original thesis.

Today was the big “El Al Crazy Deal” day. Much heralded with email and internet fanfares, El Al announced that for a 24 hour period, starting at 10:00am this morning, the El Al website would be offering amazing prices on flights for June, July and August, to selected cities. This wasn’t some cheap promo, this was a major marketing exercise with significant revenue impact for the airline.

Websites are the lifeblood of most major corporations these days. They are the shop window, store, customer service, checkout and warehouse all rolled into one. As such, their performance is crucial to the continued successful operation of the company.

At 9:58 the El Al website collapsed, even their home page was unavailable for a while, eventually replaced by a temporary “apology” page amusingly named “Crisis”. By 10:15, they were kind of back although response time was in minutes, rather than the sub-seconds we would expect from an airline website. And, it continued to break every two hours as the next group of deals was announced.

Did El Al not expect that half of Israel would be trying to login and see what deals were available? Any webmaster, with even limited experience, knows the importance of checking to make sure that their site will take the strain of such campaigns. Load testing for websites has been around as an accepted practice for more than then ten years, did nobody think to do it here? Or was it just that it would have cost too much to do?

My El Al flight last week was delayed for more than two hours while the engineering crew took four attempts to fix a problem that the pilot noticed only after we pushed back from the jetway.

As I said, an excellent example of a coffee stain.

Update: At 8:00pm this evening, the flights I was looking for finally appeared on sale. By 8:20, I had selected my flights, entered all the information and was ready to hit the final “Enter”. The moment I did, the whole application crashed with a database error. By the time I finally managed to get through on the telephone, the flights I wanted had gone!

GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR !!