Last month, Delta Air Lines gave more than 19,000 of its flight attendants Nokia Lumia 820s for in-air payments.

Some flight attendants, it seems, are not pleased with the change.

Avid Delta flyers will recall the clunky handheld payments devices Delta used previously. The flight attendant would swipe your card and hand you a paper receipt with your gin and tonic (for those of us flying coach). The new Nokias are backed by Avanade software and allow for email receipts, as well as other data for the flight attendant. That is, only email receipts, which means the flight attendants must key in each and every email address for those travelers who want a receipt. On a recent flight I took, the flight attendants could do nothing but gripe about the new Nokias.

Here’s how one airline professional put it:

Will flight attendants have to ask each passenger… “I’m sorry sir, what was that, onehotdude@yahoo… Oh no, at gmail… Ok, got it… Ma’am what’s your email address?…. Can you spell that for me?”… “Ladies and gentlemen, we will be landing in 20 minutes. Unfortunately, we will have to discontinue our inflight service at this. We realize we were unable to serve the last 10 rows. We apologize. But ya know, it’s hard typing in all those email addresses on these little Nokias. Thanks for flying with us.”

Perhaps the griping will end soon. The new system gives them access to certain customer-specific information to offer more personalized service such as upgrading seating, connective gate updates, passenger manifestos and more. It appears, however, that the software does not connect with Delta’s Skymiles frequent flyer database, however. But while this round of distribution will soon climb to 22,000 units, I understand that no sooner than Delta will have finished upgrading its payments devices will the airline replace the Nokia 820s with another device. That should lead to more griping from flight attendants.

The Delta situation amounts to a cautionary tale. The Holy Grail for retailers is connecting credit card data to the payments platform to allow for the deepest possible data at the point of sale. But there are often unforeseen consequences. Matching that traveler’s email to her Delta account data offers the airline so many wonderful big data opportunities. The theory is nice, until you’ve got to enter that data at 30,000 feet.

Photo  © Christopher Parypa