New pricing plans from Gogo

While I love the concept of Aircell’s gogo in-flight internet service, I never really felt that the pricing made much sense.  It is too expensive on the shorter flights and since the vast majority of passengers are connecting the costs could really get out of hand in a hurry.  Aircell appears to have seen the light a bit and has announced a couple different alternate pricing options since the initial $13/$10 launch point.

The latest pricing option seems to be a change for the $13 version.  Previously it was offered for flights greater than three hours in duration.  It is now being reported that as of July 15th the $13 option will be a 24-hour day pass.  That is great for folks with connections, day-trips or other similar schedules who will have multiple flights in a single day.  There is also the $50 monthly option that is available on either Delta or Virgin America.  Not sure why they can’t make the monthly good on all their systems regardless of the carrier but I’m willing to bet it has something to do with who gets paid how much for the subscription.

Both of these options, along with the $8 mobile device option are moving very much in the right direction of reasonable pricing for the service.  Hopefully the downward pressure on the pricing will continue and it will become a more reasonable opportunity.  Or I’ll just continue to read books on my Kindle (which I love) while listening to music that I bring on-board.  I do like the down time quite a bit.

Also interesting is the report over at Runway Girl about usage rates of the gogo service.  There are some who don’t see the long-term viability of the service.  And then there are carriers like Continental who are simply waiting to see some other carrier report profits from it before pursuing the technology.  In the mean time, Virgin America is reporting ~10-15% utilization of the service on average for its passengers.  That means somewhere between 15-20 users per flight, depending on the load factors they are seeing.  I find it hard to believe that they can be profitable at $300/flight in revenue.