Quality Internet: the great bet of airlines in the world

Some companies promote “very high-speed and completely free Wi-Fi”, something notable for a sector used to charging its customers for services such as luggage and seat selection.

The internet offer from 2025 will represent a qualitative leap for passengers, according to Fabien Pelous, director of customer service quality at Air France, who recognizes that the proposal so far “has not been satisfactory.”

“We look at the market situation and there are new players, like Starlink, that offer using a different technology (…) a level of quality that is almost equivalent to that of the internet at home,” Pelous explained to AFP.

The first experiences of internet on board date back to 2004 with Boeing and Lufthansa. Since then, players such as ViaSat, Panasonic and Thales have developed products that equip hundreds of aircraft.

Satellite constellations like Starlink’s have “changed the rules of the game,” according to Seth Miller, of the PaxEx website, which specializes in services offered by airlines.

In the United States, Elon Musk’s company equips the planes of Hawaiian Airlines and the regional company JSX.

Classic geostationary telecommunications satellites are located at 35,000 kilometers in altitude, but lately they have shortened by about 600 km, reducing latency, with adequate bandwidth to transmit videos.

Source of conflict?

This will allow customers to personalize their trips even more.

“We no longer depend on the airline’s list of movies, we could have access to Amazon Prime, to Netflix,” says Paul Chiambaretto, professor of strategy and marketing at the Montpellier Business School.

For companies, “a quality service that is also free is the holy grail” in terms of customer satisfaction and, therefore, loyalty, says Miller.

But “free” must be put into perspective, clarifies Joe Leader, general director of the Association of Airlines for Passenger Service Quality (APEX), based in the United States, who compared the offer to the “Facebook model.”

Delta, United and Air France reserve high-speed Wi-Fi for members of their loyalty programs. Membership is free but opens a new field for your marketing operations.

“Our friends at Delta have said it publicly, one in eight new members of their SkyMiles program ends up using the “Delta” credit card, which “offsets the cost of Wi-Fi for the other seven passengers,” Leader explains to AFP.

Some customers will prefer not to sign up and pay for the connection, he predicts. That is why APEX also advises companies to continue offering this alternative.

At Air France, installing Starlink Wi-Fi on its more than 220 aircraft will take time and represents an investment of “tens of millions of euros,” according to Pelous.

“I am convinced that in three or four years, no one will understand that we do not have an acceptable connection on board the plane,” he says.

But the arrival of broadband will pose new challenges for companies and their staff, who are sometimes exposed to unruly passengers and conflicts between seat neighbors.

“We don’t want to spend 12 hours on a transoceanic flight next to someone who is going to Skype,” says Chiambaretto. “There are also some passengers who are happy to use the plane as a disconnection bubble.”

Leader warns that “our companies must ensure that they enforce the rules of civility before allowing a ‘Far West’ of interconnected chatter.”