You’ll pay for flights by the hour, or in bulk, rather than one ticket at a time
Skyhour, a roughly year-old project under the purview of JetBlue’s Heggie, offers travelers the equivalent of a gift card for flights—$60 per hour of flight time redeemable on more than 350 carriers via the site’s proprietary booking platform. If the flight costs less than your “skyhours” are worth, you’ll be credited the difference to your account; that said, Skyhour’s ticketing agency gets to choose which flights it shows you, and results can be limited. Retail and e-commerce partnerships—such as a wedding registry partnership with Honeyfund—should give the platform lift in the year ahead. (Buy a new Rimowa suitcase, for instance, and you might get a handful of free “skyhours.”)
Meanwhile, Lufthansa is betting you’ll want to buy flights in bulk with Flightpass; it lets you buy 10 unrestricted, one-way tickets for a flat fee that starts at €500 ($570). The service will kick off long-term implementation with carriers, including Swiss and Eurowings, this year; similar offerings are already in use by Air Canada and British Airways. “We’re trying to figure out how to price it to be profitable,” says Tritus.
Self-driving cars will handle your bags
“The highly regulated environment of an airport is perfect for automated vehicles,” says British Airways’ Cooper. Today, your luggage gets offloaded from a plane onto a trolley, driven to a series of conveyor belts, and routed around the bowels of the airport until it lands on the rotating baggage carousel. “But what if your bag could be taken straight to the right place by an automated set of wheels? It would reduce cost, create efficiency, and get you your bags much faster, benefiting the customer in the end.” Expect it to be trialed in the U.K. later this year.
Lost luggage won’t be such a big headache
Thanks to an app called Linea, Lufthansa will soon be able to reimburse you instantly in the event of lost luggage. It’ll also give you real-time tracking updates as the carrier works to recover your bags. In a sample scenario painted by Tritus, you’d skip the queue at the luggage counter and simply open the app to find a proactive, automated apology with, say, three free months of Netflix to tide you over while your belongings are located. Then, later that day, you could upload receipts for your replacement clothes and get refunded right away. “We’d like to roll this out across Lufthansa’s large hubs first,” he says. “Larger-scale implementation will be difficult, because of complexities with local processes in airports around the world.”
Flying cars will replace trains—eventually
“Regional travel is totally broken,” says Heggie, citing overcrowded city airports and poor access to gates and slots for smaller carriers. That’s why she decided to invest in Joby Aviation, a company that’s building electrified vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) vehicles—think flying Ubers—to be rolled out in a few years. “It’ll transform the 50-mile travel market,” she says. “Road rage will be a thing of the past!”
Transcend Air has the same idea. Though it’s not backed by an airline innovation lab, it’s focusing on ultra-short-haul flights between major markets with its four- and five-passenger VTOL planes. They’re testing aircraft now but expect to be flying commercially by 2024.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.