Sunday, February 03, 2013

Happy Birthday to Me


Spending the day at airports. Oh joy!

Seth Godin gives a nice list of what's wrong with airline travel today, a kind of "let's learn from failure" piece.  My favorite is #5:

5. By removing slack, airlines create failure. In order to increase profit, airlines work hard to get the maximum number of flights out of each plane, each day. As a result, there are no spares, no downtime and no resilience. By assuming that their customer base prefers to save money, not anxiety, they create an anxiety-filled system.
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2 comments:

Donald McCaig said...

Dear Patrick,

For me, airplane travel time to most destinations: travel to airport + security +flight to hub +lag + flight from hub + wait for luggage +rental car pickup+drive to hotel = 7 hours. Airport aggro is worth how much - say another hour? If I can't take a train to where I need to go (no dogs, damn it), I'll drive 8 hours rather than fly.

Donald McCaig

Funder said...

Happy birthday! Hope you made your flights.