

Un-Clear: Registered Traveler Company Shuts Down - pedalpete
http://blogs.wsj.com/middleseat/2009/06/22/un-clear-registered-traveler-company-shuts-down/

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charrington
I am (was) a happy Clear customer. It saves me lots of time in the busy
airports I visit. Frankly, I would have paid more for the service. I paid more
for my United club room membership, which offered less value.

My personal theory is that they tried to price their service too low in an
attempt to get mass adoption. Think Porsche trying to sell $20K cars. The busy
business traveler who spends $50K-100K of dollars on travel per year is their
target market, not the average traveler.

Ultimately, a business has to cover its costs. Clear's fixed costs are (were)
substantial and their customer base was limited. At some price ($1000?) I
believe it could have been made profitable. However, I don't have the balance
sheet, so I may be way off.

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dantheman
This is great news; I hated everything that this company represented.

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kvs
I am sorry but the idea was a stupid one to begin with.

After 4 years in operation in what seems to be one the markets where customers
had real pain and willing to pay for painless travel (and a monopoly?) they
still needed credit to operate?

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Kadin
I think the _idea_ was sound, they just executed it poorly.

They charged an awful lot of money for a very small savings of time and
irritation. I think this wasn't entirely their fault -- the TSA put a lot of
requirements on the Verified Identity program -- but they tried to run with it
as a business and failed.

They wanted something like $129 a year, and for this you got a pass (getting
it involved 2 trips to the airport or a Clear office and giving them a ton of
personal information plus biometric data) that let you skip the ID check line.
It didn't let you skip security entirely, it just let you get to the front of
the ticket+ID check line.

I had a card for a while because I was flying out of Reagan airport in DC at
peak times a few times a week for a year. Even under these conditions -- which
would be best-case as far as a program like Clear was concerned -- I think
Clear probably only shaved a minute or two of waiting off each time.

Their whole verification system depended on you, with assistance from a Clear
agent, putting a smartcard into a kiosk, verifying your photo, and then
verifying your fingerprint on a reader that typically didn't work very well. I
think there was the option for retinal identification but I never used it (the
scanner wasn't working the day I signed up for my card so it wasn't recorded).

Up until fairly recently, the TSA wouldn't let them use the Clear card, with
all its biometric, smartcard glory, as a form of identification. So in
addition to the whole Clear card process, you'd still need to get out your
drivers license and show it to the ID-check person.

The whole thing had potential (which is sad to begin with, that airport
security is such a clusterfuck that there's a market for anything that
expedites it), but they never seemed to have it down right.

Personally I'm just glad to not have to fly regularly anymore.

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kvs
Saving time, surely a good result. Pre-clearing passengers, not so much of a
good idea to achieve that result.

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luckyland
Your background check data now available at auction.

