When I travel overseas I like to take notes on differences in technologies airlines, hotels, car rental companies offer compared to what we have in the US. Last week’s planes, hotels and automobiles in Ireland, Germany, Switzerland and Austria gave me several data points. Not just for personal curiosity, but from how it affects productivity and economics for many of our clients.
Wi-Fi Hotspots
Free hotspots – a fixture in many US hotels and airports – continue to be a rare breed in Europe. Only the Marriott in Vienna offered me that perk – and only because I was upgraded to an executive floor. Its cousin in Munich wanted Euro 20 a day, but its business center offered free wired access so there I went. Worse, there is no universal Wi-Fi provider which covers so many countries. I had hoped my Boingo subscription would allow me to log-in at 18c a minute from roaming locations. I could only at 4 locations. It happily signed on to the Eircom hotspot at Dublin Airport, but no where in Longford where there are other Eircom hotspots.
I bet T-Mobile would do better in German speaking Europe and signed up for a month. Again, could use only at 4 hotspots though Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It was really frustrating when Delta had to cancel its flight from Munich and I scampered to find alternative flights. I tried 4 different locations in Terminal 1 and could not find a strong enough T-Mobile signal. Another annoyance – when I did get a strong signal, still could not use Skype (probably breaching some T-Mobile fine print about VoIP)
Moral of the story: Get a mobile data card – if you can without needing to sign an annual contract
Mobile Roaming
Even in the middle of the 9 mile Alpberg tunnel in Austria and through most of my travels the mobile voice coverage was outstanding. Data wise, as in the US, 3G availability was mostly near major cities. And during the trip a European Union law cutting mobile-telephone roaming prices for text messages and Internet use by more than 60% took effect.
Did not help me on my AT&T plan which has outrageous roaming charges. What I did do was use my son’s phone for a few calls. My wife had bought him a prepaid phone in Ireland and even when roaming in Germany it was far cheaper than AT&T’s rates. I wish I had the phone on the way back (my family went back to Ireland while I headed home) as I tried to find alternatives after Delta canceled my flight and I could not get T-Mobile hotspot coverage. Not looking forward to that day’s bill from AT&T.
Airline check-in process
Check-in kiosks are common the world over, but I was intrigued how European airlines handle the ID scanning issue given the much wider range of passports/travel documents they encounter.
Lufthansa’s Quick Reader kiosks automate the whole check-in, passport entry, baggage tag process. Pretty impressive.
Aer Lingus had 75% of its check-in lanes automated with FastPass kiosks. Smart enough to selectively let members of a group check in (my wife was returning car so I only checked kids and me). And pay for the checked in bags ( (yes, the RyanAir disease is spreading), go to the baggage lane and scan your passport and it prints your baggage tag. Except they should scan your passport as the first step. It did not accept non-EU documents. So we went through the whole process and then had to go join the manned lines to check bags. Added 20 minutes to process.
Air France offers its own kiosks. But as their rules show, too many exceptions to what they can handle by kiosk. Which is why most passengers head for their manned booths. And frankly they need to re-engineer CDG airport – they have full-time employees doing nothing but telling passengers where to check-in. I had to ask 3 of them where exactly to check in for New York. Imagine if I was going to New Guinea!
In-flight technology
Since I first saw interactive maps on a Swissair flight in 1989, that has become my favorite distraction on a long flight. 20 years later most airlines still have the ragged old cartography. JetBlue started using Google Maps a few years ago, but hardly leverage the drill down they could provide what we are flying over.
So I was excited to see the in-flight magazine say “Air France, in conjunction with the European Space Agency, offers the most beautiful images of the earth viewed from space”. But not on the flight to New York. Same poor resolution maps – 1989 vintage.
I was even more excited to see in the magazine “ Exterior cameras give you a pilot’s view of takeoffs and landings, as well as the landscape below.” I was crushed when the flight attendant clarified only on 777-300s and we were on a 200.
The short flights on Aer Lingus and Lufthansa did not have any digital entertainment. Lufthansa on its long-hauls was a pioneer offering web access with Boeing’s Connexion, but after that shut down has been looking at alternatives.
Road tolls
I was not looking forward to a repeat of our Italian experience a few years ago – amazing number of toll booths to stop at. Would have been nice to have had transponder technology there. Germany, Austria and Switzerland keep it somewhat simple by making you buy “vignettes” (available at border gas stations) and placing them at specific points on the windscreen. We only had to stop at one toll – at the exit of the Arlberg tunnel – through our long drive.
Of course, commercial traffic even in those countries is using toll tag technology so I suspect in a few years, even non-commercial vehicles will enjoy that “privilege”. That should work out cheaper in Switzerland. They make you pay for a year-long vignette even though you only tax their roads for a few days. And the vignette is perforated in a series of concentric circles to make sure you don’t peel and reuse on another car!
Ireland has launched eTrip for frequent toll road drivers, but as a casual visitor you better hope your car rental company tells you about the “post payment” option. Lots of confusion about that.
GPS/traffic technology
I was looking forward to using the European maps on my Nokia 500. Infuriatingly, it decided to tell me there was some licensing issue when I tried to use in Ireland, not when I was downloading the maps to the SD Card back in the US. So, it would happily track where we were, just not guide us to any destination. The GPS in the Hertz car in Germany was excellent. It handled the demands of countless roundabouts, language expectations, road naming conventions across Europe extremely well. I would have bet a lot of money it would take a while to triangulate after we came out of the 9 mile Arlberg tunnel, but it was on the ball in a few seconds.
One area where Europe leads the US is road congestion information with TMC (Traffic Message Channel). Could not get that to work in the Hertz car though.
Car Return
Let’s face it – it is stressful renting cars overseas. Driving on wrong side of road, autobahn speeds, strange road signs, roundabouts. But all that pales compared to the mysteries of rental car insurance coverage. Your credit card companies will not cover you in Ireland and there is fine print in most other countries.
So in addition to the attendant who processes your return and receipt on a mobile printer, I was delighted to see a Hertz lady walk around the car and enter information on a PDA. I asked her if everything was ok and she shook her head. Only thing better would have been for her to show me what she had entered. But it is something we should also adopt in the US – given this USA Today article about post-rental surprises for so many rental customers.
So, if I were to summarize what I expected after years of harmonization across Europe and what I saw:
Positive surprises
- GPS Maps and directions well homogenized across countries – impressive given all the regional differences
- Voice roaming no-brainer – with all the local telcos that handoff to each other – and you can use one prepaid card across countries.( but I had to not use my AT&T phone much – that roaming charge is outrageous)
- Easy to find internet cafes even in small towns
Negative surprises
- Wi-fi coverage – surprised even consolidators like Boingo have not managed more coverage across Europe
- Interlining check-in across airlines even within Skyteam or other groups still evolving
- Toll tag technology inconsistent across countries
- In-flight tech in some ways worse than in US airlines – and I thought ours was behind times
