That Was The Week That Was: 21 – 25 May
Monday got off to a great start this week with the news that easyJet is now offering an app called LuckyTrip on its own app. Of course they did not just announce this, they were ‘excited’. Why are people always so excited about what is, let’s face it, a commercial transaction? Notwithstanding the excitement, it turns out that LuckyTrip is the lucky dip of travel planners. Feed in what sort of holiday you want and it tells you one interchangeable holiday destination that might work. Once, passengers booked flights to go to places. Now the passengers are being told by the airline where to fly – be sure that it will not be recommending flights that do not need filling in accordance with easyJet’s targets. But as is so often the case, once the theme is set – this week, random chance – it tends to dominate the week. So it was no surprise on Tuesday that Norwegian, itself subject to a number of putative takeover bids that are generating a certain amount of heat, hit back at easyJet with an app that selects destinations by temperature. If there is anything more random than the weather on any particular day in the future – in the case the temperature on your day of departure – it is hard to think of it. The good folk at Solar Impulse watch the weather very closely. Now they are trying to monetise their environmental good standing. On Wednesday they set themselves a challenge to find 1,000 solutions, sorry #1000solutions ‘that protect the environment in a profitable way’. Profitable for the user of the solution, presumably. The environment profits regardless of the revenue to cost ratio. Solar Impulse is also going to give the solutions a good housekeeping seal of approval, with an ‘Efficient Solution Label’ that can be attached to the solution. The focus on the solutions being profitable is interesting from an organisation that flew a tiny two-seat aircraft around the world – that was very environmentally friendly, but not so profitable. No label for them. By Thursday it was almost impossible to move with the number of GDPR emails flying around asking for consent to continue sending emails. It was a glorious moment to clean up one’s in-box, to avoid those seemingly random emails that clutter up in-boxes around the world. All that said, we are grateful for those of you that consented to continue to hear from us. Our content may be random, but our email distribution is not. Which brought us to the sunny uplands of the new email free, or at least reduced, world. Friday, when some of those emails stopped arriving, we had time to contemplate more deliberate, more thoughtful things – so why not commission a story to help fill in time when you are at an airport. If you are at La Guardia, it is perfectly possible. There are writers in residence, who will work with you to create a short story. The writers are being paid what can only be described as a small stipend, almost enough to cover the cost of the mandatory garret struggling writers live in. The stories are delivered by phone when the commissioning passenger’s aircraft lands at its destination. Who knows, that destination may have been randomly selected.Trackback from your site.