EasyJet Future Travel Experience- Paul Simmons Talks About the Future of Travel

EasyJet's UK General Manager Paul Simmons talks about possible future travel experiences, including the rise of cheap business travel, airplane legroom, and the airport experience with a warning about airport tax and the future of the travel industry include virtual and RFID check in.

This video belongs to a series of interviews with industry experts on the findings of The Travel Gold Rush report : www.amadeus.com/goldrush2020 

The Travel Gold Rush 2020 outlines how the travel sector can better ride the global economic rollercoaster and secure future growth and profitability. Pointing to the death of traditional airline cabin classes; the rise of face-to-face agents; the dominance of Asia; the decline of business class and the importance of delivering a total travel experience, the study provides new thinking and innovative scenarios to support the future of travel. 

The report was developed by Oxford Economics, a prominent economic forecasting consultancy, and commissioned by Amadeus, a leading travel technology partner and transaction processor for the global travel and tourism industry.

Based on macroeconomic forecasts and extensive input from key industry experts across airlines, travel agents, think-tanks and international organisations, the report details new revenue opportunities, drivers of profitability, new models for delivering services and the changes in traveller tastes set to influence the future of the industry.

easyJet have a very bad day with major systems crash

Today thousands of easyJet’s customers across Europe have been delayed by a systems crash lasting approximately two hours from around 15:00GMT. Twitter started to trend very quickly with customers voicing their complaints out on the Social Web without response from easyJet. As I have said in previous posts (ref: http://airlinecio.squarespace.com/airline-cio-blog/2009/11/7/does-it-matter-the-reality-check.html ) it is essential for Airlines to Keep the ‘IT’ operational lights on 365x24x7 and continuously look for root cause of any failures and put steps in to stop them happening again. At this point there is no official word from easyJet to the cause of the problem but rumors are that is was a Network failure.

Special thanks to @nickjdillon on Twitter for the photo

   

Update: It is good to see that easJet are responding to the public and apolgise for the system failure, see below from easyJet;

Saturday, February 13, 2010 | Andrew McConnell - Communications Manager, easyJet

easyJet sincerely apologise for the disruption this afternoon, this was caused by a technical fault with our reservations system, which meant that passengers had to be checked-in for their flight manually. We are currently investigating the fault, and therefore are not in a position to make further comment at this stage.

Photo Credit via twitter posted by @nickjdillon