David Field / Washington
The internet’s latest ways of enabling two-way communications with travellers, such as user reviews, blogs, customised news and product feeds, is creating a new generation of web content providing an ideal medium for a higher level of direct communication between airlines and end-users.
However, airlines are only gradually catching on to the opportunity the web offers to make personal and direct access to customers. Yet it is through personalisation and highly focused customisation that airlines can turn a ticket sale into the focal point of a relationship, one that keeps on giving to the flyer and gives the airline what it wants: a relationship that can yield repeat bookings.
Henry Harteveldt, vice-president for travel research at Forrester Research, calls this the “fifth generation of travel distribution”. It is driven by meta-search engines, blogs, social networking that includes a new type of peer review and recommendation, and a new means of distributing online content, called Really Simple Syndication (RSS). Surprisingly high levels of individual visits to the internet are for gaining information from other users, and above all for opinions, rather than to buy. About one-third of users seek opinions, Harteveldt says.
This customisation is generically different from simply adapting an airline’s website and fares inventory to reach a corporate customer through a specially designed web portal, as Southwest, JetBlue and others have done with their “just for business” portals. It can be idiosyncratic content, perhaps created by the carrier or a supplier. Increasingly, it is content created by users to be read by other users. Jupiter Research senior analyst Gary Stein says eight out of 10 potential customers will go to sources outside a company’s control, such as blogs or online reviews, rather than to the airline’s site, for an independent assessment of the product on offer.
 |
Consumer cocoons
Harteveldt says this “building of consumer cocoons” is spreading. “If you’re not doing these sorts of things, blogging, RSS, you’re missing out,” Harteveldt told the UATP/Airline Business Distribution 2006 conference in Dublin this spring. He urges carriers, travel companies and others to create more engaging web content, including adding Podcasts (audio downloads) and videos, as well as to work with travel agents already building similar visual content and adding tools that improve their ability to sell their services. He expects that online agencies, with their “resources and brains” will shift their focus from simply providing and processing transactions to supplying information and planning, using all the components of the fifth generation of travel distribution.
Harteveldt said in Dublin that while the internet may have replaced travel agents or airline city ticket office agents as the primary point of contact between a traveller and the airline, the more personality and the more human characteristics the airline’s internet presence has, the more meaningful a replacement it is. This harks back to some of the earliest visions for the web as more than a tool for information conveyance and data-sharing, but as a way to create communities bonded by shared interests that are, in effect, a self-editing mechanism.
For Harteveldt the motivation is simple: travellers want control. They want reviews and evaluations they can trust, says Anthony Rodio, marketing vice-president of SideStep, one of the first online travel agencies to offer RSS.
Expedia has also embraced RSS. In its simplest form RSS is a highly customisable system to feed news headlines directly to a user’s computer, and because it is structured around and set by the preferences of the users, it is also an ideal outlet for individual user reviews. “The response has been several times greater than we anticipated,” says Rodio. He calls the phenomenon “Web 2.0”. Glen Drury, Yahoo!’s vice-president of northern Europe, notes that these and other forms of customisation are often called “collective intelligence”.
Other forms of this shared social networking include Wikis, a form of compendium that lets users create, update or comment on their travel experience. Wiki comes from a Hawaiian word meaning “quick” or “fast”. Its most widely known application is the Wikipedia, a collaborative online encyclopedia. A hotel site, TripAdvisor.com, grew from eighth to third most visited US online travel site by March with the addition of user reviews, and last month added a Wiki function that lets users correct or update the posts of others. This is, according to Rodio, the next generation of the old standby, the guidebook – in effect an internet-era Baedeker.
As in the past, however, airlines have been relatively slow adapters to the new technology applications that their distribution intermediaries have eagerly embraced, notes PhoCusWright consultant Norm Rose. The noteworthy exception, as often is the case, is Southwest Airlines, which has direct customisation to its frequent flyers. In 2005 it started DING!, a branded desktop application that is loaded directly into a user’s home computer. Mitchell Ahern, director of AdTools, a Boston-based marketing firm, says these applications “deeply engage” the user and “extend the longevity of the brand experience”.
The DING! application has passed 2 million downloads and generated over $80 million in direct revenue in less than a year. In another move, Southwest this year became the first airline to open an internal blog to its customers.
Compiled by its own employees, the “Nuts about Southwest” blog offers “an inside view” of the airline and its people, whom Southwest has always viewed as a key marketing outlet. Rose says that Southwest is one of the few carriers that could offer a blog without running the risk of so much public scorn that the site becomes a liability. Harteveldt enthuses about the Southwest blog as a way to extend the airline’s personality.
However, the initiative receives an interesting reaction from Robert Scoble, a blogger who has been called the conscience of the corporate blog. Scoble, a Microsoft employee, gained fame for compiling an in-house blog that was respected for its neutrality. He says “Nuts about Southwest” is “a pretty cold blog so far”, but explains many ways in which it could demystify the corporation and bring people inside the airline.
Still, says Rose, airlines will have to be prepared for such new forms of content as trip advisers. He reminds carriers that worry about a backlash that “the web has already enabled dissatisfied customers to voice their opinions”.
Independent blogs
“If the blog ends up being simply a public relations mechanism, it will have limited impact on shaping consumer opinion and could ultimately anger consumers who want to express their views,” Rose concludes. Indeed, it is control or user input that make the difference in blogs. For example, in April, the Starwood Hotels group launched a blog, the first ever in hotels, which was roundly criticised as a corporate advert because its content came solely from the lodging giant.
That reaction, says Stein, stems from people’s need for control, which is the emerging issue. Online consumers want to be in control of what they want to see and where and when they want to see it.
This sort of peer-reviewed content will have its greatest application in attracting and gaining the loyalty of leisure customers, says Michael Qualantone, vice-president of global distribution strategy for American Express travel. He says: “When business and corporate travel begins moving towards dynamic packaging, with its added hotels and so on, it will become central, but right now, content is core and it’s all about the basics of airline content.”
The web is ready to harness the power of public reaction and opinion as user-generated peer reviews arrive. Airlines, however, may find it is better to create their own self-critical channels rather than let others do it for them. ■
Source: Airline Business
