Poppi | Airline Innovation
Industries
Deliverables
To help airlines anticipate disruptive innovations that could leave them left behind, Teague conceptualized Poppi: a tech-savvy airline that focuses equally on passenger experience, brand loyalty, and the bottom line.
Challenge
Revolutionary innovations in overland transportation—namely, autonomous vehicles and Hyperloop—have the potential to disrupt commercial aviation in dramatic ways. At a minimum, both technologies have the capacity to make short-haul air travel obsolete. Why fly from Seattle to San Francisco if your autonomous car, complete with a lie-flat bed and big screen TV, can just drive you there overnight? And why fly from Los Angeles to New York if Hyperloop can get you there in under an hour, and without burning any fossil fuels? Poppi showcases innovations airlines and airports need to design today to be relevant in the future.
Solution
Poppi is centered around technology. In Europe and North America especially, eliminating lines will require stretching the airport beyond its physical footprint, and doing things like in-transit TSA screening. Inside the airport, we’ll need to bring passengers to the gate right when they need to board, not earlier or later. Connecting passengers to just-in-time information and prompts will be possible through smart tables and other infrastructure that’s fully integrated with airport and airline systems.
Borrowing from the sports world, which gives ticket holders a platform to resell their seats while pocketing a piece of the transaction, the Poppi airline app allows its members access to either resell their seats instead of paying for a change fee, or swap seats with other passengers boarding the same plane. In addition to a sense of camaraderie, this gives passengers greater control over a process in which there is rarely transparency or the opportunity for negotiation.
Poppi also presents reasoned alternatives to some of commercial aviation’s most deeply entrenched practices, including how airlines handle bags and the way cabins are organized. Instead of traditional overhead storage for carry on luggage, the airline startup brings back the fedora bin: A small compartment suited for coats, hats, and briefcases. Smaller bins would speed up boarding time by 70%, and shave 3,000 lbs. off a 777 jet, saving airlines up to $25 million a year in fuel costs.
Baggage is tracked safely by RFID tags, so that it can be dropped off as early as possible (at train stations on the way to the terminal, perhaps) and returned at destinations on the other side.
