Airline group Air France-KLM, formed after the merger of Société Air France and the Royal Dutch Airlines and currently the largest airline company in the world in terms of operating revenues, has recently launched a social network for travelers called Bluenity to connect its +75 million customers when traveling (presumably so that they can meet up with strangers).
An airline moving into social networking is interesting, so we decided to take a look and see how it compares to internet startups who are looking to monetize social platforms catered to travelers. Unfortunately, in this case, it turns out to be not much more than a marketing exercise.
In terms of features, Bluenity doesn’t bring anything new to the table, but you’ll find all the necessary basics: you can edit both your leisure and business profile and you get to share your regular departure airport, favorite destinations, number of flights you take per year, and countries you’ve visited in the past. Bluenity lets users interact with other members, connects to their Facebook profile and enables users to share travel tips with each other. I think they would have been better off integrating tips and reviews from other travel communities that have been around for years and offer valuable content in abundance (e.g. TripAdvisor) and letting you choose which profile (e.g. LinkedIn) you would like to point to.
I also suspect they will moderate the hell out of the service because their Traveler Charter reads “the Bluenity community encourages travelers to choose good humor over conflict and positive advice over negative criticism. Optimism and enthusiasm are essential to maintaining a friendly atmosphere.” So honesty is fine, just be positive when you’re being critical. Right.
(Stowe Boyd even had his profile picture rejected because it was pixelated.)
I still like Dopplr better (other comparable services include TripIt, TravelMuse, TripSay and more), because it doesn’t make a distinction about which airline you’ve chosen to travel with—if you were in doubt, Bluenity only lets you share trips that includes one of Air France-KLM’s flights—and are open to include relevant information and multimedia content from third-party sources (e.g. photos from Flickr) rather than keeping the network a walled garden. Another major advantage to using something like Dopplr instead, is that the service leverages your existing relationship rather than trying to get you to hook up with total strangers.
What’s odd about Bluenity is that it displays travel tips and comments about hotels, restaurants, and attractions in all the languages the service is available in: French, Dutch and English, even when you indicate in which language you would like to browse the social network.
Last but not least, I think it’s a shame that they decided to boast about being the very first airline to launch a social platform for travelers, when that is clearly not the truth (cases in point: British Airways has Metrotwin while Lufthansa operates both GenerationFly and GenFlyLounge).
To conclude: I think there’s value in airlines engaging their customers in a more social way, as long as they realize that people are generally not loyal to either one airline company nor to a single social network. But it would be better for airlines to launch platforms that are open, or plug into existing communities by partnering with social networking services who have been doing a great job at building and maintaining groups of travelers for years now. Otherwise the barriers to adoption are just too great. Would you want to be friends with the people sitting next to you on a plane? No, you want to get away from those people as soon as the plane lands.
Reminiscent of Coca Cola’s shrimp farms. They should stick to planes. You don’t see Digg starting an airline.
“Join the virtual mile high club with” is the new “poke”.
Yup, I agree. This is just another marketing game. It may make sense feature wise. But if the (airline) moderators are going to interfere with all the activities, then what is the point?
http://phokki.com – turn Photo into graphic Art
This is cool, but what we wanted to do with social networking for Air Travel was to allow people to choose whom they site next to based on their profiles. I had over 250K miles in less than two years on Virgin and KLM going to London and Amsterdam from SFO and I would have loved to choose if I sit next to a single redhead or a VC in the first or Biz class (Upper class) on Virgin. If I can pay 8K for a flight I may as well choose who is sitting next to me
I would even pay a few hundred $ more for that option, or the bank would have paid it (of the taxpayers in today’s case) 
Right. The key is linking your social network to the airline’s reservation system allowing passengers the chance to sit next to someone from their social network. Even if the person next to you is only a friend of a friend or a group member, it is better than sitting next to a total stranger or worse missing an opportunity for a good conversation.
I personally wont use it but then again who knows may be in a year or so they become a hit. Imagine the -evety when Hulu was launched…
I personally wont use it but then again who knows may be in a year or so they become a hit. Think of the -evety when Hulu was launched…
Hi, you may be interested also by the fact that Air France-KLM opened in nov 2008, 2 islands in Second Life, as the first Airline group in a virtual world. A project done by imarginal.com
See photos, videos, and direct SL link here:
http://airfranceklm-sl.com/en
November 2008? LULZ
Interesting post and move by these European carriers. But they’re not the first to venture into social networking. American Airlines launched their Facebook application called TravelBag (but only one carry-on per passenger)
last summer.
Also, by way of clarification, the social tie-in with TravelMuse is around the actual planning of the trip (think pre-booking). The emphasis with the TravelMuse Planner is to decision support: enabling co-travelers to collaboratively decide on where to go, where to stay, what to do prior to booking.
TripIt and Dopplr are complementary, I would argue, and extremely useful for coordinating confirmations and plans that are already set.
PS – Where’s our CrunchBase box?
Ironic considering they’ve just announced an increase in their award flight redemption levels and a decrease in miles earned on their business fares. AF/KL will be a no-go area for while
You forgot to mention the #boarding service, based on Twitter, http://www.crun...any/boarding-fr to help twitter user find other travelers in airports, which is pretty cool and easy to use (no sign-up!).
In fact, I don’t think that people really need a website such as Bluenity, the brand add no value . Dopplr and Trip-It are providing a real service.
I travel a lot and the idea is actually fantastic, but I dislike that its from air france/klm instead of one site with all airlines.. i use pretty much every airline in the world (whatever is cheapest and least stops
))
would be cool if you can see your network and plan dinners/meetings in cities where you have stops or freetime during your flightplan etc..
“connect its +75 million customers when traveling”
What does that mean?
nice niche… Good luck with it
I think it will surely fly
http://www.ZaaBiz.com/
So we know who developed this site? Was it internal to AF-KLM?
Sorry I meant to say: Do we know who developed the site?