Last month, Delta Air Lines gave more than 19,000 of its flight attendants Nokia Lumia 820s for in-air payments.
Some flight attendants, it seems, are not pleased with the change.
Avid Delta flyers will recall the clunky handheld payments devices Delta used previously. The flight attendant would swipe your card and hand you a paper receipt with your gin and tonic (for those of us flying coach). The new Nokias are backed by Avanade software and allow for email receipts, as well as other data for the flight attendant. That is, only email receipts, which means the flight attendants must key in each and every email address for those travelers who want a receipt. On a recent flight I took, the flight attendants could do nothing but gripe about the new Nokias.
Here’s how one airline professional put it:
Will flight attendants have to ask each passenger… “I’m sorry sir, what was that, onehotdude@yahoo… Oh no, at gmail… Ok, got it… Ma’am what’s your email address?…. Can you spell that for me?”… “Ladies and gentlemen, we will be landing in 20 minutes. Unfortunately, we will have to discontinue our inflight service at this. We realize we were unable to serve the last 10 rows. We apologize. But ya know, it’s hard typing in all those email addresses on these little Nokias. Thanks for flying with us.”
Perhaps the griping will end soon. The new system gives them access to certain customer-specific information to offer more personalized service such as upgrading seating, connective gate updates, passenger manifestos and more. It appears, however, that the software does not connect with Delta’s Skymiles frequent flyer database, however. But while this round of distribution will soon climb to 22,000 units, I understand that no sooner than Delta will have finished upgrading its payments devices will the airline replace the Nokia 820s with another device. That should lead to more griping from flight attendants.
The Delta situation amounts to a cautionary tale. The Holy Grail for retailers is connecting credit card data to the payments platform to allow for the deepest possible data at the point of sale. But there are often unforeseen consequences. Matching that traveler’s email to her Delta account data offers the airline so many wonderful big data opportunities. The theory is nice, until you’ve got to enter that data at 30,000 feet.
Photo © Christopher Parypa
Shouldn’t the system pick up the email address/credit card used for registration/payment from the seat number the paying passenger is sitting in?
It should, but I don’t think Delta has built that capability yet. That’s the link to the Skymiles database mentioned above — it seems that the connection has not been made between its database on flyers and the POS. Obviously, that’s what Delta (and other retailers) needs.
Rubbish comment, no guarantee email is the same…
Earlier this year, I was on a flight from ATL to LAX and the Delta flight attendants announced that they would only accept cards for payment … no cash. On the return flight, their “system was down” and could not accept cards for payment … only cash!!! Consumers are willing to go cashless, but its just not consistent.
It would be nice if Delta could take your FF card, swipe it, and automatically charge your card on record (a la iTunes). Agree with you that they are trying to solve one problem (reducing cash) but introducing further problems.
I fly Delta almost every week. Flight attendants are pushing an easier work-around… they have paper receipts that they fill out with a pen. That’s what I ask for… as stated above, I don’t want to announce my email address to all of my seat mates. How does an organization of this size make such a dumb move?
With a pen?!? I am sure that’s not Theresa Wise, the CIO of Delta, had in mind when she greenlighted the spend on this new POS platform.
On my particular flight the device could not connect via the WiFi. I hope it is not competing with all of the users on board if that’s the case good luck with communications.
As I understand it, the new payments system does not have to connect to wifi in order to work. Apparently, it can store the CC data and upload it once a wifi connection is established. I’m not sure why on your particular flight, Tommy, the payments system did not allow for that.
I’ve used the system a few dozen times with no issues whatsoever. No waiting, no dictating my email address to a busy flight attendant in a noisy plane. Why? You know what I don’t need? A freaking receipt for a $6 cocktail. Or a $5 can of Pringles.
Every time, it magically shows up on my credit card statement in about 15 minutes. People need to lighten up.
At first, a reader can interpret blame to be the Nokia device. It is a poorly designed system. It appears the system was designed by someone who never flew on a plane to witness first hand the attendant / customer interaction. What a snafu!!!