Human Factors

Normally I love Air New Zealand. Although they sometimes seem to be a little under-staffed, the overall travel experience is always great. And they develop amazing things for the web – for example How far can I go? and Home sweet as.

But today I thought they might have gone a bit over the top with the urge to deliver a perfect user experience. As Gold Elite members of their loyalty programme, Kai and I had a big envelope in the mail today, containing our new ePass. The ePass is a SIMcard sized tag, that can be used to check in quicker by waving the tag about 2-3 cm of a kiosk. Koru Club access is also faster, maybe because you don’t have to talk to the friendly lady who usually checks your boarding pass anymore. And the craziest thing: they want me to stick it to the back of my mobile phone! Are they insane???? I’m not sticking anything to my iPhone! Ok, there’s another option, you can also stick it to something else that you always carry with you when you travel. I guess, that would be my Air New Zealand Airpoints Card. So what’s the point of it? The checking in procedure at the electronic kiosks has been great most of the time anyway. Apart from all those days when they were out of order, but this is likely to happen with the new system as well.

Air New Zealand ePass

I hope that there are some real advantage to this, maybe I’ll find out about when I’m traveling the next time…

Update: With the mPass iPhone app there’s no need for me to still carry the ePass for traveling. Flight details are now automatically loaded into the application, and a barcode created for scanning at both Koru lounge and  boarding gate make the ePass redundant for me.

I haven’t been blogging for quite some time. Reasons for this are many, but non of them is a really good one. As a main reason could count that I’ve spent most of the winter in Europe and used the time overseas to reflect the things I was doing and the life I was living in New Zealand. It turned out, that my life was great but I didn’t enjoy my job any longer, so on my return I started checking out opportunities and learned heaps of new stuff – and here I am now, two weeks into a new job, which I really like and enjoy. Now only summer needs to come and stay, and the world will be perfect :-)

The blog design is still far away from being nice, but the move from BlogCFC to Wordpress was quite painful, so I currently don’t care much about the looks, I’m just glad that all old entries survived the move. Most entries are assigned to the wrong category now, but this is something I can live with and one day, when I can’t think of anything else to do, I’ll change them manually. But for now it will be ok, I guess. Let’s get back to dealing with all things usable (or unusable)…