Un-Clear: Registered Traveler Company Shuts Down
blogs.wsj.com
blogs.wsj.com
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.
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?
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.