Innovative or annoying?

Emirates Airlines have just announced they will be…

  

“the first airline in the world to commercially launch an inflight mobile telephone service, affording even greater convenience to passengers wishing to stay connected while traveling.”

Hmm… has one of the last bastions of peace and tranquility afforded by the lack of mobile phones has just been destroyed?

 annoying-cell-phone.jpg

  

The question is this: Which airlines will decide that many passengers will hate this ‘innovation’.

 

I can only see it making the traveling experience less pleasurable. On top of this Emirates has invested some US$27 million to fit its fleet with the AeroMobile system. On something which may actually turn away customers!

   

It’s also true that Emirates currently has 7000 calls made per month from its in seat phone service. Approx $200,000 revenue which will be lost every month.

With certain innovations smart startups will often need to decide which half of their customers they want to keep happy. It will be interesting to see how this one plays out.

3 thoughts on “Innovative or annoying?

  1. I’m sure they will retain the $200k in revenue somehow.. are they selling internet access yet? Or, if you’re in cattle-class do you have to pay more for this ‘feature’? I don’t think they are about to go broke over it 🙂

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