Niko Herzeg Marketing

So the Esta form, the one introduced to help create a safer USA, is going to cost $14 dollars as of september of this year. $4 covers the admin cost, the remaining $10 will be spent promoting America for tourist purposes.

In 2009 just under 11 million people visited from Western Europe alone (part of the Esta program), so that times $10 dollars is $110 million from this part of the world alone, from 2013 on out (taking into account that people who now travel and fill out the form can use it for free over the course of 2 years and travel keeps current levels).

How will this money be used to increase the customer experience of people visiting (or planning to visit) the USA? As of now no plans have been made public, so we can only wait and see. In the meantime it is a nice reminder of the choices we face everyday.

Increase the price by a couple of pennies, cut budgets on “non essential services” cause they are not visible. All to eek out that extra gross margin to “stay competitive in the future and to be able to continue to provide customers with the experience they have grown accustomed to”.

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. And if you do, you better make damn sure customers feel a genuine improvement in their experience by actions that grow out of these financial decisions.

For always the best way to ensure healthy profits is to keep customers satisfied. And the key to this, boringly, is to improve your product and service first and charge second. Not the other way around.