Technology plays a big role in 3rd party ancillaries, but not as big as good products do

 

Many players in the ancillary revenue market, whether we are talking about airlines or service providers, can see the hype around technology being the most important factor of maximising ancillary sales.

We live in an era, where simplifying the customer journey is essential, and that is the way all airlines and service providers should head to. We cannot expect the customers to wait many seconds until their search drops the results, and we cannot overflow them with complex products in channels, where every second counts, such as the booking path of an airline.

One click, service is put in the basket, finish the booking and pay.

To fulfil this, sales channel optimised products are necessary, which – in case of airport transfers – cannot be complex. You cannot offer the same collection of products in the airline booking path and the white label website if you want your customer to finish the flight booking.

Developing this takes time and experience.

We have been in the ancillary revenue industry for nearly 13 years, seen and experienced different solutions which airlines tried out to increase their ancillary profits. Many of them failed, many of them succeeded, but to reach success the key was always to avoid using overcomplicated tech solutions and focus on having good quality products and competitive rates.

However, it is true that good technology is important, as using collected data for the creation of ‘customer profile’ based sales solution of ancillaries gets a bigger role in the near future.

I believe that this year’s Aviation Festival will be a great platform for discussing such interesting questions.