Open skies implications

Have you ever heard about the following scenario?
A commercial market was closed for free competition for a long period of time.

After a governmental reform, it was allowed to be open for competition.
The regulator now allows any operator that meets safety and security standards to operate in this market, regardless to its name or history of operations (to some extent).

As a result, the situation of the customers in this commercial market has worsen. Prices are up, availability is lower, conditions have aggravated, reachability to products is now harder than ever. All because more companies are now allowed to deliver a product only few were allowed to deliver beforehand.

I never heard of one, but air transport regulators in Israel are probably afraid of just this scenario. Otherwise, how would you explain their resistance to the offering of European travel officials to expand the European ‘open sky’ agreement to Israel?

Isn’t travel a global language?

 

An article at m-travel, a travel news resource, have recently caught our eye.
Skyscanner, which is a great tool for searching low cost flights, have announced to be adding Chinese to the site languages, bringing its offering to 18 languages.

m-travel actually made the step to list all languages Skyscanner is now available in: Czech, Danish, German, English, Spanish, French, Russian, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Swedish, Turkish, Chinese and Greek.

There would have been no reason to mention this if that would have been an industry standard. Skyscanner contains at most 500 different words. Translating these would cost you ~€50 per language on Elance and twice as much with a professional translator. Even to Chinese.

Can you imagine a better marketing tool than this? How come this is not an industry standard? How come websites such as Kayak and Sidestep which have raised dozens of Millions have never done such a move?

Maybe they ask, ‘Why would we need Chinese if we don’t work in China’?

Skyscanner proves that its not the funding that matters, its your view.
Skyscanner sees itself as a global tool and makes the obvious moves to prove it. Kayak and Sidestep see themselves as US based tools. And when they do make a translation its part of an ‘expansion move’ into a ‘new market’. Followed with strategy announcement and press releases.

Travel is a global need. Travel search engines would find a flight from anywhere to almost anywhere (don’t try searching for Cuba or Iran…) – Yet, most of them think you should learn English before getting on a plan.

We think that a language should not be a barrier. After all, we are all looking for the same thing, aren’t we?