The Traveling Introvert

Show notes

Not all airlines are the same. They have huge differences when it comes to the processes and the services that they offer. What a particular airline features, might not be offered at another, and vice versa.

For today’s episode, I’d like to talk about airline loyalty and its importance to a passenger – especially if you’re an introvert who travels a lot. Aside from that, I’m going to share with you a different experience flying with a totally different airline to show you how confusing it can get.

Transcription

Hello, and welcome to The Traveling Introvert! Today we’re going to talk about airline loyalty. I’ve realized I haven’t been done a travel one in a while. It’s not because I haven’t been traveling, it’s just because – yeah, there’s been a lot going on. Alright, so, traveling and being loyal to an airline. A lot of people, especially now with this low-cost airlines, this ultra-low cost airlines and where I do a lot traveling, there’s maybe three or four big airlines. So, why should you or shouldn’t you be loyal to a particular airline?

A lot of the time when people are shopping, when they’re looking for flights, they’re looking for availability of the flight, timings so that it fits in well with what you want to do, and cost – and that’s great. And over the last trip I took, I took a flight with an airline that isn’t my airline of choice, and here’s the differences in how I travel, when I’m traveling with my airline of choice because I am a frequent flier with them and I have a certain level of membership with them, I don’t worry about if I miss the connection that they’re looking to make sure that I get my next flight or that I’m not going to be taken care of in some way, shape, or form. I’ve definitely been stuck in an airport due to weather, and they’ve put me up in a hotel and put me on the next flight out. They’ve even re-routed me on the odd occasion, they lead me to an airport that wasn’t my original airport because I was like, “Well, I can go to this airport instead!” and they managed to do that for me. That was something I didn’t have to worry about. I knew all the procedures, I knew how to check in. I know I can check in on my phone for this, or if it’s international, I know I have to get to the airport. I know what the lines are like for them because I have the status, but with this other airline that I traveled with once before but it was a day trip from San Francisco to LA. But this one was a different trip with a layover and it was only a 45-minute. That was the best time they had.

And so this trip was different from a mindset point of view. I went, I can check in online, or they had what was called like early bird check-in process, but they didn’t let you know if it happened or not – which I found really interesting. So I ended up messaging them and tweeting them, and be like, “Hey, I paid for this extra thing but I didn’t know if it happened. How will I know?” And they’re like, “Well, we do it 72 hours beforehand, but you won’t know until 24 hours beforehand, but if didn’t work then it’s too late for me to do anything, anyway.” So there was that form of communication. I got to the airport extremely early because I didn’t know what their lines would be like, and it was over the holidays. And so, I was spending extra time in the airport that I wouldn’t have done normally. And then their boarding system I didn’t know about, so I wasn’t sure [do I line up over here, do I line up over there?] Does it have to be in numerical order exactly, or is it just a rough assessment? It was very, very different.

It wasn’t stressful per se, but definitely, I wasn’t on autopilot. I had to be paying attention and asking questions and being unsure, I spent a lot of extra time in the airport that I wouldn’t...

Hello and welcome to the Traveling Introvert. Today, I want to talk about online summits. The reason that I want to talk about this is because I recently ran one, and it was about podcasting, believe it or not. I want to talk about the process that I use before I ran my summit, so there's some information out there that people generally don't know about summits. Summits are touted as a very good idea to help raise your visibility and make you look like an expert in your field. You'll find a lot of big names do summits, and so I wanted to do a virtual summit. I looked around because I like and I enjoy learning new information, and I realized that there was a podcast out there, a podcast summit, and it was the biggest summit in the world, and it had over I think 75 speakers and ran for a very long time, which is great, but 75 speakers? Okay. Say it's 30 minutes each. It's still an awful lot of time that you have to spend listening, and yes, we do binge podcast, but we don't binge summits in quite the same way, and I'm curious why not.

Also, I was doing some research. I listen to some podcasts. I use my podcast app to search for online summit, and it brought up all of the episodes that podcasts had that talked about online summits, and I went and listened to them. One thing that struck me when I did that and did some more research is there are very few out there that do the following things. There are very few online summits that pay their speakers. It's another one of those things where you get exposure, and exposure is the currency that people who run virtual summits use to get people on board.

Another thing that I realized is a lot of summits won't let you speak unless you have a certain amount of followers. They don't care if they're engaged followers. They don't care about that. They just want the numbers, so you need to have five or 10,000 followers because what they do is affiliate marketing. They say that, okay, if you're going to be on the summit, you need to email blast your newsletter and so on and so forth and do X, Y, and Z, and then whoever buys tickets, and not the free summit tickets but the actual all-access pass, which we'll talk about in a minute, then you get a percentage cut. While this is great on the surface, it means if you have a smaller sort of footprint as far as follows are concerned, you are less likely to earn as much money as someone who has 10 or 20,000 followers who click on everything that they do. It means your earning potential is low.

The other thing that I realized is a lot of the summits, in fact, all of the summits have something that's called an all-access pass. This all-access pass gives you access ... some of them, a lot of them say lifetime access to the summit, and you can look at all the videos and what have you afterwards. Great, except when they change their platform or they pivot their business. A lifetime access is a lifetime of what and or who. One of the things that I did with my summit, and I will continue to do so moving forward is I paid my speakers. I appreciate that they are professionals and they've given up their time to ... and spend an interview time with me. I will pay them. It might not be thousands of dollars, but I will pay them. It shows respect. I'm tired of people wanting to do events and not paying their speakers because of the exposure. I'm tired of people not being given a voice because they don't have a certain amount of followers. Just because people don't know who you are yet doesn't mean you or your voice isn't valuable.

The other thing that I did was, yeah, great. You have the all-access pass full and lifetime pass. Most of them are $200 to $300. My pass, not only was it an access pass, it's not a lifetime access because things change so quickly, and I want you to keep up, so it's a six months to a year sort of pass. It was at under $100, and you got four weeks' worth of one-on-one and group...

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