Passenger experience in a pandemic – Turkish Airlines.

Service Review

Author: Peter Horvath, Strategy & Service Design Lead at Whitespace

Date: 20 April 2022

With an airborne global pandemic still at large, it’s not a great idea to become airborne yourself by stepping on an airplane. However, our global lives know no boundaries, so we need to get used to flying even in this situation.

I've been traveling quite a bit over the past year and wanted to share some thoughts on the passenger experience in a pandemic.

Flying in the Time of Covid

This review was done in 2021, and after sitting in the drawer for a bit, it seemed like it might lose its timeliness. Sadly it is as relevant in early 2022 as ever, with the 4th and 5th waves of Covid around us, and the World Economic Forum even identifying infectious diseases in general as the 6th in its list of “most severe risks on a global scale over the next 10 years”.

Flying and pandemics need to co-exist. Turkish Airlines does an exemplary job at setting your mind at ease during flight, but a closer observation reveals the lack of an end-to-end approach and some strange choices.

1. Pre-flight

At booking

When booking on their website, more curious users will find the “Rest assured when traveling during the pandemic” card below the booking, leading to a dedicated page. This seems nice, but the page heavily disappoints by listing a whopping 130 frequently asked questions.

Remember, when your FAQ has 130 questions, those are not frequent.

This smells more like a legal obligation than real customer centricity. Look at the page, it just goes on and on! How bad this page really is only became clear to me later. Read on...

FAQ part 1

FAQ part 2

FAQ part 3

FAQ part 4

FAQ part 5

Improvement opportunity: a communication hierarchy

People don't read web pages. They scan them. Scanning FAQs, especially 130 of them, is practically impossible. Even using the browser's search functionality is difficult, as results might not be findable by the browser, or visible to the user. At least the FAQs here are structured into topics, which is a good start. Turkish Airlines should extract the most relevant information from each FAQ topic, and list them at the top of each section.

How to know what's "most relevant"? User research, intelligence from site searches, and discussions with Turkish's hotline.

A ninja move? How about an automated chatbot as an entry point that serves you the most relevant answers to your question, as well as showing related searches and answers?

Confirmation email

The email also follows the pattern of the website, with little attention to the simplicity with which information is conveyed. Anything Covid-related is stuffed into the fine print, making it clear that this attention is more focused on the legal department than on the passengers.

Confirmation email

On the bus

Traveling itself is not just a customer journey, it is an experience map involving multiple intertwined service providers. Turkish Airlines has little control over what happens in your cab or at the airport, so let’s start the physical journey on the shuttle bus.

Here, at last, Turkish Airlines’ Covid measures start to shine. They allowed far fewer people on a bus than usual (airport busses are often fully-packed). This was a clear sign calling attention to social distancing and reassuring me of the airline’s attention to the pandemic.

(Sidenote: I still cannot get over the fact that we collectively chose the expression “social distancing” instead of “physical distancing”, but now we have to live with this.)

Explore the concept: customer journey vs. experience map

The most wide-spread approach explains that

a customer journey focuses on interactions of a customer and a company (e.g. a passenger and an airline)
while an experience map is company agnostic and depicts an end-to-end experience until full goal accomplishment (from destination selection all the way to one's arrival home after a vacation)

You will quickly notice how powerful it is to consider what your customer has done before getting in contact with you, and what they will do after they complete their transaction with you.

Despite the above explanation, there is no real established vocabulary around the naming of how a customer's journey through a product/service experience is depicted - easily leading to confusion. Nonetheless, the concept is used in business management, innovation, and of course service design.

2. In-flight

In-flight entertainment system

In the "movies" section of the in-flight entertainment (IFE) system, Covid got the top placement, and a list of videos are available for passengers.

Covid safety videos

Safety video

What causes you to pause for a second is how people in the animated safety video are not wearing masks. While re-shooting a safety video would be high budget, adding masks to animated figures is easier, though still not easy.

But more important would be the debate: is this intentional, or not? Should we allow masks and general acknowledgment of Covid to seep into every aspect of our lives?

I believe Turkish Airlines did not make a mistake by leaving the safety video as-is, especially in the light of the next step...

TK Extra Care

This is where Turkish Airlines begins to shine. They made an extra safety video focused on Covid, and it tells the story in a professional manner, really showing what the carrier does to ensure passengers safety. The video makes invisible, behind-the-scenes safety efforts (like plane disinfection and air filters) become tangible. And to tell the story, they didn’t only make a video, they made a whole brand around it, calling it TK Extra Care! And they made a logo for it!! And got a celebrity to narrate it!!!

TK Extra Care

Explore the concept: making the invisible visible

Did you ever notice that in hotels, the end of the toilet paper roll is neatly tucked in? This small thing is part of a large concept called physical evidence, and it's a widespread concept in service marketing.

Services are inherently intangible, even ephemeral. And behind-the-scenes parts of your service are always invisible to your customers. Like a thorough cleaning – it is the lack of dirt, but how can you make this evident, and even use it as a differentiator?

This is where the practice of adding physical evidence to your front-stage or back-stage service – like rolling up the tip of the toilet paper or showing the disinfecting cleaning in a preflight video – can have a real impact.

A controversy

The celebrity face behind TK Extra Care is Dr. Oz. (I didn’t know this either, but TV personality Dr. Oz is of Turkish descent and has cooperated with Turkish Airlines in the past.)

Let’s stop for a second, and lament this choice. Sure, as a TV personality, he is well known, but at the same time, he is very controversial, leaning towards pseudoscience and alternative medicine.

I don’t mind him promoting Turkish Airlines in general, but he might not be the best choice of medical personality to have me rest assured in a pandemic already riddled with fake news and false claims. Despite his Turkish heritage and celebrity, Dr. Oz is probably not the right person for this job.

Dr. Oz

A disconnected web experience...

At this point, I realized I hadn't read about this TK Extra Care in either the 130-FAQ-long Covid page or in the booking confirmation email. So I went back and explored Turkish Airlines' website, and to my surprise, I found 5 pages about Covid!

The TK Extra Care with Dr. Oz page
The Traveling during COVID-19 pandemic page
The Tips for safe travel page
The Safe Flight Experience page
And the already mentioned FAQ-laden What you should know about flying during the pandemic page

Some of these pages are linked, but some aren’t ... and even when they are, they include a lot of duplication. I can only speculate, but it feels like multiple departments in the company saw Covid as their own topic – and they each created efforts without coordination. As a confused passenger clicking between these 5 pages, I would not be reassured that efforts in execution are better coordinated than the website. However, they do have a Diamond-level Health Safety certification from the independent airline association APEX, and that is a good endorsement.

Web pages about Covid

Diamond level certification

Improvement opportunity: talking vs. telling

Turkish Airlines provides 130 FAQs, and 5 different webpages about the same topic! I'm beginning to see a pattern here – they are talking, not telling. The difference is who the focus is on:

Are you egoistic and want to talk about all the things you want to say, you are proud of, or what you think is important?
Or are you empathetic, and want to tell your customers what they need to know?

Turkish Airlines should take another look at their pages with the above point of view, and they will quickly be able to scale down to one page. Not only will it be better for users, but it will be easier to maintain for Turkish Airlines' communications team as well!

Hygiene kit

It was an awesome idea from Turkish Airlines to provide every passenger with a personal Hygiene Kit. This includes disinfecting wipes and masks, but a much more important ingredient is control: no matter how visible you make the invisible efforts, passengers are in a control-deprived situation when flying. Giving them an opportunity to do something themselves is super valuable on a psychological level.

Explore the concept: give the passenger control

When it comes to security, people don't just want reassurance, they want control. You can be the best service on the planet, but by giving your customer the opportunity to have control over that service, you can become the best in the universe!

It is important not to confuse the opportunity of control with the necessity of control. Fast-food restaurants and low-cost airlines can afford to offer lower prices because they outsource some work to their guests. Turkish Airlines provides extra control for reassurance with the hygiene kit's disinfecting wipes, while doing the service themselves beforehand.

Airline crew

The airline crew wearing a mask is now standard, so let’s not dwell on that. But the TK Extra Care program goes beyond this, as it includes a “Hygiene Expert” crew member. Sadly, there is no physical evidence of this crew member, nor any explanation of what that title includes or what the job entails. A missed opportunity for sure.

Improvement opportunity: announce and identify the Hygiene Expert

On most flights, apart from automated announcements before takeoff, you will usually hear the flight attends (Cabin Service Director or Inflight Manager) talk personally to the passengers, often introducing themselves and the pilots by name. This is a great opportunity to also point out the hygiene expert, and briefly mention when passengers should turn to them.

An expert level move: the hygiene expert's uniform could even have a small addition, to set the expert apart from the rest of the crew.

3. Post-flight

Survey

Airplane passengers often watch the in-flight entertainment system up to the point of disembarking. Turkish Airlines made a survey available after the landing announcement, which is a great way to capture passenger feedback. The survey was rather long, sadly, but included questions about health and safety – contrary to the photo I took, I gave them high marks.

Survey part 1

Survey part 2

Improvement opportunity: provide a Covid test in the Hygiene Kit

The hygiene kit is a great idea but focuses only on the 'inflight' part of the travel. By extending the view from what the airline considers a 'trip' to what passengers consider a 'trip', Turkish Airlines would realize that the trip is far from over. Adding a Covid quick-test would allow passengers to test themselves rapidly once the flight is complete, sparing them a trip to a pharmacy to pick up a post-flight test. This would show people that the airline is not just interested in the flight, but in the travel.

4. Summary

I flew with multiple airlines during the pandemic, and Turkish Airlines is by far the best in its attention to Covid, or at least in communicating about it. Their inflight efforts are exemplary, with a lot of physical evidence to their behind-the-scenes efforts, plenty of personal passenger attention, and a great deal of focus on communication. However, various disconnected efforts, strange choices, some missed opportunities in physical-digital integration, and the multitude of web pages leave room for improvement. A great service nonetheless, and I hope other airlines follow suit!

All opinions expressed throughout this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of Whitespace or its affiliates.