Passenger Services & Experiences

To be successful as an airline it is not only important to fly from A to B as cheaply as possible and to be punctual. In today's highly competitive world, an airline needs to meet or exceed the customer expectations.              

We are customer experience experts: we help your airline to gain and use customer insights, to implement personalized and digitalized services and to successfully leverage your ancillary revenues.                                    

We will be happy to give you a concrete example:

Customer problem

• A large European airline had a huge problem: the number of denied boarding compensation cases increased drastically.
• The main driver was the EU regulation requiring higher compensation in the case of denied boarding due to overbookings, and delays.
• Executing the compensation process led to longer handling times at the gate/service desk (approx. seventeen minutes per passenger) and hindered other processes.

Approach

The purpose of the concept was to design a streamlined handling process as well as its digital IT support. The steps we took were straightforward:

1. Conducting a field study
2. Drafting the digitalized processes
3. Recommending IT technical solutions
4. Conducting a financial analysis

Recommendation

 a.      Digitalization

• Implementation of a self-service customer portal – access compensation options from everywhere at any time.

 b.      Product modification

• Offer rebates on future ticket purchases instead of fixed deductions of ticket rates.
• Limit the redemption options.
• Limit voucher redemption on a single ticket purchase transaction.
• Identify the ideal rebate level on the ticket purchase.
• Verify customer acceptance through customer satisfaction surveys targeted to affected passengers.

Impact on client’s business

• Reduction of cash compensations replaced by higher rate of vouchers - 5.27 million €
• Additional revenues via ticket up-selling - 0.13 million €
• Avoided loss of revenue by crowding out full-fare passengers - 0.09 million €
• Avoided costs for ancillary reimbursement by third-party purchases - 1.00 million €