GTE Airfone seeks higher altitude >BY DAN O'SHEA, Technology Editor

Recent pricing changes, special holiday discounts and more forceful marketing may help GTE Airfone travel from a novelty to a competitive business tool.

Earlier this month, the in-flight communications service provider launched a usage-based pricing strategy featuring a $2.99 connection fee and $3.28-a-minute airtime charges for calls of three minutes or less. Users previously paid a flat $15 fee. The service also will offer a $15 maximum per-call airtime charge, encouraging users to make longer calls.

GTE Airfone has also launched a corporate program, Airborne Office, for volume discounts on business calls and a new individual plan, Home and Office, for discounts on frequently called numbers.

The company is hoping to spur growth in the use of in-flight phones-still seen as somewhat of a novelty-and also to get people to use Airfone instead of their cellular phones. "With cellular, there is a per-minute charge and a roaming charge. With Airfone, you can make a call waiting for take-off, during a delay or a brief layover, and pay only $15," said Katherine Harless, president of GTE Airfone, Oak Brook, Ill.

"Our vision is to have people use Airfone in the same manner as they would use their office phones. We're another service choice, it's just that we also provide service at 35,000 feet," she said.

Among other marketing and services strategies, the company will offer a prepaid calling card for $24.95 that allows unlimited calling during the month of December, with general availability of prepaid calling planned for 1997.

These strategies arise when GTE and the other two in-flight communications carriers, AT&T and In-Flight Communications, have just about finished deploying extensive ground-based digital infrastructures to offer increased calling reliability and feature flexibility.

"With the digital reliability there, it's no longer a struggle to have a conversation. Now it's time to really package and promote the product, and that is what we're trying to do," said Harless, who was named president of GTE Airfone in July. Based on her past performance-directing the company's Texas/New Mexico operations and steering its 1991 re-engineering-she should have a positive effect on a service once derided as unreliable and too expensive.

Data released earlier this year shows that Airfone service is available in 1876 aircraft flown by about two dozen airlines, with more than 68 million calls logged.

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