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 !!