Was just scanning my iGoogle homepage containing all my RSS feeds and saw this from the Airline News feed I get from topix.com. The six most recent news items listed are all bad news – really bad news. Yesterday Eye for Travel was taking a postive spin from the recent US results and did a story on ancillary revenue growth, but when I see six stories in a row that look this bad, it makes me think it is time to call it a week, head home, and forget about the airline industry until Monday comes around and it starts all over again.
January 2009
Monthly Archive
January 30, 2009
January 30, 2009
News this week from New Media Age that Virgin Altantic are planning to launch some type of social networking site for travellers. Best analysis on this subject is coming from Alex Bainbridge who also compares this initiative with Metrotwin from British Airways. When it comes to BA and Metrotwin, the Times Newspaper wasn’t quite so kind. It is way to early to refer to 2009 predictions that are less than a month old, but I’m now wanting to up the probably I gave of only 20% that one airline will launch the Web 2.0 killer app this year. I talked earlier this week on the AF-KLM venture Bluenity, and I’ve previously mentioned the frequent flyer community that Qantas have started called Travel Insider.
I came across this recent article talking about what Southwest, JetBlue, Delta and Virgin America are doing with social media, but the focus of that article is more on their involvement with Twitter, Youtube, Flikr and Facebook. My interest in this space is purely related to how an airline can use Web 2.0 to increase revenue in a profitable manner; mostly via the collection of extra ancillary revenue or additional direct sales of tickets, rather than indirectly attributable benefits like positive brand image. In order to do this, the airlines mentioned in the first paragraph are having a red hot go at owning this space, but there is still room for late entrants to win this game as none of them have got it 100% right just yet. I’m not even prepared to put money on a likely winner at this stage, but maybe in 6 months it will all become much clearer.
I’m convinced this is a space that eventually one large airline will own in Europe, one will own in Asia Pacific, and one will own in the Amercias. And it will most probably be a large airline. Whereas I am astounded on the rare occassions when a small airline tells me they are not sophisticated enough to chase ancillary revenue, there is little doubt that the winner of the game to own the Travel 2.0 killer app/website will be a medium to large airline (if indeed it is an airline at all), in their respective region. The size of the prize really is very large on this one.
January 29, 2009
Never before have I heard an airline CEO give ancillary revenue such prominance when it comes to explaining a good financial result. Read the quote below from Maurice Gallagher, Jr. President & CEO of Allegiant Travel Company (ALGT), a US Carrier that regular readers of this blog will get used to hearing me refer to frequently.
And then the following quote from Ponder Harrison – Managing Director Marketing & Sales.
Managers responible for ancillary revenue generation at every other airline must be looking at these numbers and hoping that their own boss hasn’t seen them. The potential in this area for every airline is massive, and it is simply unacceptable to use the argument that because your business model is different to Allegiant your airline can’t expect to generate significant ancillary revenue. The numbers will differ, the types of ancillary products will differ, the ways in which they are presented to the passenger will differ, but the goal of having your own CEO credit your contribution and the contribution of ancillary revenue when announcing impressive financial results should not differ.
January 28, 2009
I’ve been using the Air France / KLM social networking site Bluenity a bit over the past week, and it was better than what I was expecting. There does seem to be a curiosity factor in being able to see what type of people will be on the same plane journey as you, but the difficulty is not to make it feel like, in the words of my wife, “a site for people looking to pick-up.”
The comment above is interesting because sometimes the people covering social networking become such evangelists that they forget to factor in the views of those who haven’t yet jumped on the bandwagon, or were on it but have since jumped off. But there is no doubt that knowing who is (or isn’t) sharing your journey can’t strike a chord with people. Just look at the bold PR stunt this week from Activities Abroad who claimed they could promise ‘chav free’ holidays as they supposedly searched there database and found no-one with the names Sharon, Chantelle, Britney, Bianca, Tiffany or Chardonnay. But they did find travellers called Sarah, James, Charles and Rachel which according to them implies a higher quality of holiday-maker! I say it touched a chord because they apparently received threatening calls as a result, but the company founder was unrepentant.
Using Bluenity, I don’t recall seeing any Chantelles or Britneys on my flight, but a site like this needs more than names of some of the fellow travellers to make it compelling. The share a taxi to/from the airport is interesting, although as an experiment I added a share taxi request and received no enquiries – I’m not sure if people could see it was me offering to share a taxi from the airport, of if there was a general lack of site usage, but eitherway no-one took me up on the offer. I suspect it was the latter, or at least I hope so!
I don’t think getting travellers to review restaurants etc will ever take off in a closed community like this, but I question why it needs to remain closed. If AF/KLM opened it up so people on other flights could input their flight details, then they could make the site stronger. I’d never suggest doing it all overnight, as the progressive opening up of Facebook from Harvard to other Ivy League, to other universities, then to schools etc is a great case study in how to ensure the audience is widened in a sustainable way. But with Tripit launching an API this week, and other companies getting into the itinerary space, airlines who want this business face some innovative opposition. I honestly believe a clever airline can own this space; having all the direct channel PNRs and the frequent flyer database is an incredible head start in any race of this type. The real question going forward is will Bluenity be able to build on its existing functionality, or will another airline pick up a cheap yet catchy domain name and come out with a site that leverages all the assets they already possess and take a lead in this very interesting area of e-commerce.
Overall verdict on Bluenity: Congratulations to Martijn Van der Zee (VP E-commerce, Air France/KLM) and his team for taking such a bold step. Potential is definintely there, but it is early days yet, and it needs to offer more compelling and unique content before it can really succeed as a community for travellers.
January 27, 2009
What better way to start this post than with this weeks news of Arthur David Proskin who was knocked by the trolley. Instead of being jolly and keeping quiet as a mouse, fired off a verbal volley and went straight to the big house!
I was on a KLM flight last night and there are always a few people that buy from the in flight shopping guide as the trolley comes down the aisle towards the end of the flight, but I’ve never seen more than a handful of people buy on any flight I’ve ever been on. It is clearly an area where there is potential for more ancillary revenue. Qantas had their critics fuming when they reintroduced on board tobacco sales last year after a long hiatus, but clearly this is a big selling item that people would have bought at the airport if they didn’t buy it in flight.
I was speaking to one airline executive a few months ago responsible in part for growing his airline’s in flight sales and he discussed the idea of better promoting the ability to pre-order duty free purchases during the servicing flow for direct channel customers; will be interesting to see how effective they are in this endeavour. I’ve never really spent much time looking at this specific area of airline ancillary revenue, so I was surprised to see there is a publication that deals exclusively with travel retail. The focus seems to be more on shops in airports, but they also cover in flight sales. I also saw an accouncement today that GuestLogix has appointed Ralph Richardi, former Senior Vice President of Customer Services at American Airlines to the Company’s Board of Directors. I am seeing quite a few annoucements from this company, but at first I confused them with Farelogix, the GNE company. From what I can gather, there is no relationship between the two apart from a similar sounding name. I was very interested to see GuestLogix are able to sell assigned seating tickets to Broadway shows on flights into New York – this overcomes the watches / sunglasses problem of wanting to touch it, play with it, try it on etc before you buy it. This currently loss making company looks to be growing very fast if the following quote is any indication
With so many areas in which an airline can go chasing ancillary revenue, it is no wonder that the industry conferences on this topic are proving so popular with both airlines and vendors.
January 23, 2009
A couple of days ago I promised to continue detailing my experience of booking a hotel via the web for an upcoming business trip to Amsterdam. Where I left off then was departing the KLM hotels website in search of somewhere else to make the booking. I decided to have a look at Kayak, 
and the hotel I was searching for showed up for only €67 via a site called easytobook. After clicking on the link to be redirected, I found that upon arrival at easytobook they were planning to add 5% to the price quoted on Kayak and would charge my card immediately. The second part wasn’t such a problem, although I’d normally prefer to be charged when I leave the hotel; but the 5% extra leaves a bad taste in your mouth as it means the price on Kayak was incorrect. It reminds me of the bad old days when many airlines were quoting prices exclusive of taxes and charges which meant absolutely nothing to a consumer trying to compare.
Next I went to look at Opodo, an Amadeus owned OLTA. 
This was interesting as the Spanish site was quoting me €70.32 but there were no photos for the property I was interested in. The UK site prices in Sterling but with a Euro approximation, and most interesting of all, contained around 10 photos of the NH City Centre Hotel in Amsterdam. It is much easier for me to work in English than in Spanish, so I’d prefer to book on an Englisg language website where possible; but I prefer to be charged in Euros, so I didn’t want to book on the UK site. The Spanish version of Opodo does not give English as an option, and as I was doing the searching with this blog post in mind, I didn’t mind spending a few more minutes checking out one more site. Seeing as my work focus is on airline direct channels, it seemed strange not to have a look at the hotel direct website.
The NH’s own website has some of the most painfully slow to load pages from a major company I have experienced in quite some time. But I’d killed enough time on my search so far using other sites that it was going to take more than a slow loading page at this stage in the process to stop me buying. I suspect for other consumers, the slow loading pages would have been an instant turn off, as normally it would have been for me.
I found the hotel I wanted and the page said minimum price of €79.00. When I clicked on the purchase button and moved to the next page I was offered a price of €70.32, exactly the same price Opodo in Spain was quoting – at least it wasn’t higher than the previous page, but I doubt NH intended it to be this way!
NH call back feature
The other interesting part of the site was the button on the purchase page (circled in red in the image) allowing me to leave my telephone number and have an NH staff member return the call to close the sale or answer any questions. It reminded me a little of the Norwegian airline Wideroe who have a chat feature on their homepage, although what I liked about NH was that as it is on the page with hotel location and price quoted, it should make any calls to customers much quicker to close. This assumes the information from this screen is passed to the call centre agent – it sounds obvious, but from the many of the call centres I’ve visited or called, I’ve learnt to never assume that things always work in the way common sense assumes they should.
Maybe I should have added my phone number to see how it worked, but by this stage I was ready to just enter the credit card digits, pay my €70.32, and secure a room in Amsterdam. And that part of it worked effortlessly.
January 22, 2009
Just received an email from Spanair that takes an interesting approach to marketing, but unfortunately it is only done in a half hearted manner rather than really putting the boots in. If you are going to attack Ryanair, then you have to do it with a bit of flair, as matching brashness with timidity rarely (if ever) yields positive results.
Spanair marketing email
Spanair is in a very tough competitive position in the Spanish market given the flag carrier Iberia dominates business travel and the profitable Latin American routes, LCCs Click Air and Vueling have just been given the OK to merge, and LCCs like Ryanair and EasyJet dominate a lot of the leisure routes to and from Spain.
So Spanair have decided to emphasise that they are a “full service” carrier. The email bullet points roughly translated are:
- Low price guarantee
- No optional extras pre-selected
- N/A (special govt discount for remote communities)
- No charge for seat selection
- No charge to pay by credit card
- No charge to board the plane
- No extra charge for checked-in baggage
I think this type of marketing approach properly executed for an airline could work, as some of the charges Ryanair have invented are amazing. For example, last time I looked there was a charge to check-in at the airport, but internet check-in was only available to adults travelling with no check-in luggage. But full credit to them if customers wear it, and all indications so far are that they will. If Spanair really want to differentiate themselves from the LCCs, maybe they’ll have to try some marketing tactics that will get them a bit more notice.
January 21, 2009
It is always a risk mentioning a product of site without actually trying it, but when I first mentioned Bluenity, the social networking site from Air France / KLM, I neither praised nor criticised this venture. From what I could gather it only made sense to join the site if you had a flight booked on one of those carriers. So now that I have a booking on KLM, this week presented the perfect chance to join up, and from fiurst impressions the content is more compelling than I was expecting. I’ll write more on this later, as I will need to wait until after I’ve made the trip to Amsterdam to make a proper conclusion on the benefits of this site.
So instead, I focussed on the Manage my Booking page in the servicing flow of KLM.com; I also looked at the ancillary services offering, and then made a brief comparison with hotels from others sites. It is valuable exercise to look at a wide range of airline websites, as you often see little things that they are doing well, and likewise little things that could be improved – but it takes time (and often an actual booking), which means I don’t do it as often as I should. I decided to put some of the screen shots up here in order to share my views on some of what KLM and the others I visited have done. I captured these screen shots using Windows (Fn + Prt Sc) before a colleague told me that Super Screen Capture was a far superior product, so I’ll try that program next time.
SMS and email notification
The thing I liked most about the Manage my Booking page was the options for notification. Many airlines still assume that SMS is the best way to contact travellers when they are on their trip, but with so many business travellers now carrying a BlackBerry or similar, it really makes sense to ask the passenger for a preference. Personally I find that SMS messages sometimes do not get to me when I am roaming in certain countries, whereas I can always retrieve email – if I can’t get it on data roaming, then at least it still gets to my PC (not so useful for a delay announcement), but at least they never just disappear like an SMS. I recall being in New Zealand late last year and not getting a delay notification, but the airline involved told me later they only sent text messages to local mobile phones. Surprising given that I was a high tier frequent flyer, yet they did not consider me worthy of a text message or email (or even a personal call) just becuase I had a Spanish mobile. I’ll have to wait and see if the messages from KLM actually do arrive in my preferred format, but assuming they do, this is a very good service. Only criticism for this part of the page was that my email address and mobile phone number were not pre populated, even though I know they were present in the PNR. It would have been better for KLM to try and pre-fill them; I could then correct these if they were wrong or if I preferred to use a different email address.
Image Linking to Ibis Hotel Offer
I still needed to book a hotel, as the colleague I am meeting in AMS and who is also travelling there, told me he was staying at the NH City Centre. Probably not the most upmarket hotel in AMS, but in these days of heightened cost consciousness I shouldn’t complain too much! The manage my booking page actually promotes the IBIS hotel in Amsterdam rather than showing me search panel. In a perfect world they probably would have seen I was travelling on a full economy fare and tried to push a more expensive hotel to me, but it wasn’t until I click on the link that I realize the reason for KLM pushing one hotel maybe is not quite as ingenious as I first gave them credit for. I assumed they would get an override or maybe have negotiated a paid advertising deal with the IBIS chain. Whilst this may be true, it is when you click on the link that you see the way they have integrated iseatz into a frame on KLM.com and it was here that I started to think there was maybe a different reason not to promote search.
Poor Use of Screen Real Estate
Unless I immediately purchase the hotel recommended, I find this display very difficult to navigate. I tried searching for NH hotels in AMS, but because you have a scroll bar within a frame it is extremely difficult to manage the searching process. I’ve added a red box to the image in order to demonstrate the screen space allocated to hotels. There is no doubt that Allen Darnell (CIO of iseatz) has a good understanding of ancillary revenue for airlines, as I spoke to him at length when we met in November 2008, but unfortunately for KLM, at this point I decided to search for and therefore book the hotel via a different internet site. I’ll continue this subject with another post later, adding some cursory observations on a few other sites I used, and how I ended up making the booking. Part of my job involves maximising the ancillary revenue for airlines by working with whichever third party suppliers they have chosen to work with and I never personally get involved in the selection process if an airline is choosing one hotels offering over another; therefore it definintely was interesting this time to put my consumer hat on, and see how KLM had integrated iseatz, and then how other OLTA’s, metasearch and NH’s own website compared.
January 20, 2009
Alex Bainbridge writes a good blog aimed at his client base of tour operators, but he often covers points of wider interest. I was reading an interesting post of his called “Why don’t other travel technology companies take part in social media?”
It is a highly recommended read for anyone in a large IT company trying to understand some of the challenges and issues in being present (or not being present) in social media forums likes blogs. Through this blog and others from my colleagues, Amadeus are treading gently into this space. It takes a leap of faith to really engage in this area, but I’m not sure what other choice large corporations really have.
Alex is spot on with the TUI and TravelCat vs Rapid example he gives of users commenting on a companies products, and those companies standing silently on sidelines as their product is criticized. Most or all of these comments on a brand or product will get indexed in search engines, so even if the senior execs or buyers of IT systems don’t actively engage in the social media forums on a daily basis, they all know how to do a search on Google!
January 19, 2009
Reading a post today on Yahoo filing a patent for “Identifying excessively reciprocal links among web entities” got me thinking about airlines and search engine optimization (SEO). The author of the blog post made the following comment:
I’ve heard stories of companies paying digital ad agencies or their SEO affiliates to engage in the practice of link building using reciprocity as the bait. I always assumed this must work, but as as it is not my area of specialization, I was surprised to read it is not neccessarily money well spent. If Google AdWords really increased in price 100% from 2007 to 2008, then no wonder airlines are looking at any way possible to boost their organic ranking. It must be tough for airlines that have made quite an effort to build decent landing pages to improve their search engine rankings to see the competition with a less informative landing page rank ahead of this. This is what I saw today when doing a Google search for “cheap flights madrid boston” and Spanair were the only airline appearing unpaid on the first page. I was surprised Iberia didn’t appear until page 4, especially as they have spent some time making very good landing pages. The result that did appear on page 4 of Google was actually a Dublin landing page!
A very nice page making use use of cached data (internal Iberia development) giving available prices over many months. Manually changing the URL to replace Dublin with Boston it would appear Iberia do not have a landing page for this city pair even though they fly directly to Boston from Madrid. I changed my Google query to “cheap flights madrid dublin” and sure enough Iberia were the top airline coming in at number 5; postioned after Cheapflights, Kelkoo, Skyscanner and eDreams. No idea how this page from e-Travel came in at number 6, especially as I had never heard of the company before, the page was of very little value, and the origin and destination were not even pre filled. But interesting at least in that e-Travel was the old name for the Amadeus department responsable for the e-Retail IBE back when it was called Planitgo.
With all the metasearch companies paying for prominence on Google (as well as having mostly good SEO), it makes me glad I don’t work in the arbitrage business of buying clicks for one price and selling them for a higher price; especially if the cost of incoming traffic really is increasing by 100% year on year. I doubt that such price rises for AdWords are sustainable with the economic downturn; marketing budgets usually being one of the first to face the axe in any company’s spending review. But it does emphasise the need for airlines to look long and hard about how they are attracting customers to their websites, and how much they are paying for this. Now is the time to be cutting some good deals for traffic that has proven to convert into ticket sales.
