Venture Concept No. 1

The opportunity that I am describing pertains to all those travel on major airlines at any point in their lives. There is a huge gap in the customer service that people expect from airlines and other businesses such as restaurants or professional services. The reason this exists is because airlines have a very tight grip on the market that they operate in and despite how they treat travelers sometimes there is little that is going to happen if your experience goes poorly.

Forces changing the environment that this venture would operate in would be the massive area that social media can cover in a short amount of time. People who have unpleasant enough experiences will take to the airwaves in order to voice their discontent with how they were treated by the airline they were traveling with. Whether it be a dog dying or a man being dragged off against his will, people will make sure that the PR of a company is tarnished. So that they can have a nice settlement from the company. With consumers having the potential power to seriously hurt airlines it is critical for airlines to begin stepping up the services they provide for distressed travelers. Airlines are great at being nice when things are going smoothly, but when you miss connections or get massive delays they do nothing to mitigate the damage that is done to people who are extremely far away from home.

The customers in this market are currently not having this need satisfied. The need of the peace of mind that you will be taken care of when you travel. Even if something completely out of your control takes place. People will pay money in order to help them in the future from something they can’t control. This way they feel like they have some kind of control over the situation. This opportunity isn’t a ground breaking discovery that will change the world. It is something that would potentially become an industry norm and be considered necessary when purchasing an airline ticket. A form of insurance that makes sure they get home safely and comfortably when things go wrong. The window of opportunity probably will not be terribly long because it will be difficult to put barriers to entry for competitors.

              The innovation that I have come up with in order to help distressed traveling is an insurance plan that they can purchase before they go on a flight. There might be things that are similar to this offering in the marketplace at the moment, but I want to make it a little different. My competitors currently sell insurance separately and not at the point of sale when people buy their  plane tickets.. For this reason they are missing out on huge revenue sources that I would be gaining.

              By positioning my product in a convenient place for the customer to purchase I can expect my service to be used over others that offer similar plans. If people simply just have to hit a button in order to get the insurance that they won’t be stranded in an airport when they are traveling. In order to make this a reality I would have to be in communication with the airline companies and integrate our payment plans into their payment processing interfaces. I know that airlines will be inclined to do this because my services would take the stress of caring for disgruntled passengers off of their hands. If people had the option to buy the insurance and they didn’t then the airline could avoid all liability for the situation that the person is in. This is a win-win for the airlines and would be the prime location for marketing my services to the target market that would be looking for it.

              I would be selling an insurance bundle plan that would calculate the cost of the plan (per flight) by taking a percentage of the total cost of the roundtrip tickets or how many miles a person is traveling. The farther a person is traveling, or the more expensive their ticket is, the more money you could charge for their plan. A thousand dollar trip could have an insurance cost of $100 because of how far a person must be going if they are paying a thousand dollars to get there.

              My innovation will provide for the opportunity that I am speaking about because it will provide travelers an option that they didn’t previously have. A lot of people probably would not have even known about any kind of travelers insurance because it is so uncommonly used nowadays. By using my innovation, and putting the option at the point of check out, I will increase the number of people traveling insured and potentially make it the norm to travel with an insurance plan.