I’m starting to pull together plans for a business trip. The idea is that I’ll go to the Boston area for a meeting, fly on a couple of days later to Bangalore, then back home to San Francisco. A typical multi-city trip, reminiscent of my days at Sun. Naturally, I begin by visiting the travel sites: Yahoo Travel (powered in part by Expedia) and Orbitz. History suggests that the best schedule will probably involve multiple carriers….
But there’s a problem: each site offers only a few choices. After a moment, I realize that I’m not seeing anything from American Airlines (and precious little from their oneWorld partners). AA has decided not to play ball with the Internet travel sites, and they’ve reciprocated.
Fine: let me try the American website. This is a disaster. (Somebody teach AA about user interface design, quick!) How about their partners in crime, British Airways? That’s even worse: do they really expect me to do SFO-BOS via LHR?!
American may think that it makes sense to try to pull travellers from the aggregator sites to their own website, but doing this means giving up on the multiple city, multiple carrier market. I always though that this was one of the most profitable segments in the airline business. Maybe there are too few of us for American to worry about, but alienating business customers seems monumentally stupid.