Published Articles
Airline Innovation: How FSCs Challenge LCCs with New Products
Air travel is a commodity. For most travelers, price is king, and fare competition is fierce. Over the years, the vicious circle of price wars has left a trail of airline casualties. Surprisingly, many other industries manage to thrive in a commoditized environment, and airlines can learn from them.
Commoditization occurs when the market perceives products to be substitutable. When products are substitutable, customers will naturally purchase the cheapest, and businesses will fight to lower their costs. It is common for economic textbooks to use the evolution of the American airline market after deregulation to introduce commoditization.
How Heathrow Launched an Easter Mobile App
This post is part 2 in a new series by the Heathrow Airport Innovation Team. In the previous post, Richard introduced the Heathrow innovation process; how we gather business challenges, score and prioritise them for trial projects. Today, we share a successful initiative that combines several smaller business challenges with innovative technology to produce a fully fledged passenger-facing, custom-made mobile app. The Easter Treasure Trail app enables families to play an interactive game using iBeacons. It uses location-based and context-aware services that were tested and launched in Heathrow Terminal 2.