
Article by
December 19, 2017
“Build it and they will come” used to be the norm.
Not anymore.
In the hyper-competitive World of digital travel sales it is imperative that you go out and actively seek your customer’s attention if you wish to diminish your reliance on intermediaries and get a bigger slice of the cake.
Promotional offers remain, of course, a key tool, but there are so many creative ways to cater to different groups of travellers...you can offer flight search based on destination maps, search by budget, or search by preferences (beach or mountain? Or perhaps a city break?) to name just a few…curation and inspiration are becoming a thing!
Just make sure that, as we explained on these same pages a few days ago, if you make your offers too attractive, a sudden surge of traffic doesn’t mess with your main site!
So far so good, but a little detail that, in our opinion, is usually not emphasized enough is that of execution. This is the moment your marketing team has all those wonderful ideas...that can only be partially implemented because they hit the inevitable IT department bottleneck.
This is why we advocate for a bundled, flexible, solutions to empower the airline’s marketing team.
Bundled because it facilitates an integral management of the different functions that your marketing department would need to aggressively manage promotions without having to worry about the technical aspects of what they do or having to wait for the overstretched IT team to build it.
Flexible, because, despite the practical benefits of an all-in-one solution, you should also be able to implement each solution separately, if circumstances require it.
The latter is particularly important in those cases when an airline is happy with at least part of their legacy systems, when this happens it is a matter of strengthening what is already working well and give it an extra boost with new capabilities.
An example of this is the new newshore_promo, a modular solution that includes a marketing module that enables the easy building of all sorts of marketing-oriented websites, from low fare finders to the purely inspirational. It also uses an advanced pricing cache to prevent any issues derived from surges in traffic and keep look-to-book ratios under control whenever your visitor numbers spike.
At the same time, a direct notification tool automates and streamlines the process of reaching out to your customers, massively or in a segmented way through multiple channels: email, sms, push notifications, chatbots…
And of course, it plugs into any internet booking engine and PSS (although if you were to throw in our newshore_booking solution into the mix, we would be happy to oblige!)
Contact us for a free consultation. We will be delighted to help!