Another Texas VC

One of the things I look for in every startup I evaluate is customer orientation. I want to make sure that the entrepreneur has fully thought through the customer use-case and understands the implications of their product on a customer. I bring this up because I am stunned by how bad airlines are at this.

When you book a flight with an airline, they tell you the departure time. I couldn’t think of a more useless piece of information to tell a passenger. You can’t board an airplane at the ‘departure time,’  in fact, if you read the small print on the back of a boarding pass, you are explicitly told that the crew can  close the door to an airplane 15 minutes before the ‘departure time.’ So why confuse your customer with this piece of information? Its not like they are actually flying the airplane and know when the plane is scheduled to get pushed from the gate.

True, airlines also provide a ‘boarding time’ on the boarding pass as well, but the implication is that you can board the airplane between the start of the ‘boarding time’ and the ‘departure time’ which is not true. In reality you can only confidently board the airplane between the ‘boarding time‘ and fifteen minutes before the ‘departure time.’

As you can probably guess, I ran into this issue on Tuesday at Ohare where I showed up at the gate of a flight 11 minutes before the departure time. After giving me a lecture, the gate crew re-opened the door to the aircraft and let me onto the airplane. Of course all of this would be avoided if the airline never gave me this silly piece of information in the first place!