Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to deliver a presentation on passenger tracking at the American Association of Airport Executive’s (AAAE) Annual Conference in Phoenix, AZ.  As always, the conference was a hit and I was honored to be a part of this important annual industry event.

The theme of the panel session was on Passenger Tracking and how new technologies are providing benefits to airport operators, concessions operators and passengers. I shared the panel with Kristin Shaw of SITA, Inc. and Faith Varwig, of the Faith Group, LLC, who spoke of some of the ways in which technology is being used to implement passenger “flow management” in airports.

Beyond these emerging technologies, I shared in the presentation that it is also important to remember that there are many (free) ways that airports can also begin to track passengers through social media tools and airport website booking engines. By working these tools into a strategy and using what we have at our “social fingertips” airports can begin to get a feel for passenger behaviors and patterns. Pairing these social tools with the mobile and GPS/Bluetooth technologies that are up and coming can help airports to get the most …

By now, Estonian Air is quite a superstar on social media having done a number of innovative campaigns on Facebook followed up by the World’s First Social Loyalty Program. And when we chose them as one of the three big guns to vote for in the March round of SimpliFlying Heroes, Estonian Air trumped KLM and SAS despite stiff competition from them. We reached out to Tero Taskila, the CEO of Estonian Air and he was kind enough to oblige us with some juicy tidbits about the story of the airline’s rise as a social-media presence. Previously, he has done an exclusive podcast with us – check it out for some inside scoops on Estonian Air and its plans for this year.

 
The Growth Story
The forerunner of Estonian Air social media was an old-fashioned customer forum that gave official, but informal answers to airline-related questions. This was the first user-generated online content and gave Esstonian Air confidence when new forms arrived. They continued with a blog where they shared slightly longer articles of public interest. This became a channel to explain background of news, route development etc.

Estonian Air’s focus has always …

Are traditional frequent flyer programs going the way of MySpace? CEO of BalticMiles Gabi Kool tells us what he thinks the future of customer loyalty programs will look like and why you should keep an eye on the Baltics.

We recently recorded a podcast with Gabi in which he shares some exclusive tidbits about BalticMiles and the future of loyalty: you can buy it at a special price of $19 here.

Here’s a question for all you airline marketing experts out there: how do you get travelers to stay loyal to your loyalty program in such a crowded market? The answer, if the success of Aeroplan and Multiplus is any indication, points to the coalition program model. For BalticMiles, the Latvia-based loyalty marketing company owned by Air Baltic, evolving from a “pure” frequent flyer program to a pan-Baltic coalition partner has certainly helped it increase its market share significantly. To date, it has 130 partners, 11,000 points of sales worldwide and half a million members, a number which the company is hoping to grow to a million by the end of this year.

Leading the charge at BalticMiles is Gabi Kool, who …

Back in 2011, we published a Top 10 on the Best Social Loyalty Initiatives by Airlines that featured a location-based initiative by the British low cost carrier BmiBaby in partnership with Gowalla.  The campaign eventually evolved into a wider off-airport engagement strategy where  travel experts created virtual city tours based on Gowalla check-ins that allowed travelers to explore several different cities served by the airline.

Now, the airline has decided to further enhance its efforts to engage with people based on their location, by launching an Instagram campaign that allows communities of users to meet in person on trips sponsored by BmiBaby.
Instagram community meetings
Instagram is a free photo sharing application on iOS that allows users to take a photo, apply a digital filter, then share it on a variety of social networking services including Instagram’s own. BmiBaby was able to exploit a particular trend within the Instagram image sharing network: having “Instameets”.  Instameets are user-organized events where Instagramers take part in a “photo walk” and take pictures of a particular location or town, that are then shared on Instagram under a dedicated hashtag.
BmiBaby launched a campaign to celebrate the 4th World Instameet Day by providing free travel to members …

Even though it seems like yesterday, our popular top 10 initiative has reached its first birthday and we’ve decided to celebrate it with a king-size slide deck featuring the best case studies from our past top 10s.

This top 50 has been designed not only to celebrate the first birthday of the SimpliFlying’s Top 10s but also to provide our readers with a unique downloadable resource that features what we think are the very best marketing initiatives put forward by airlines and airports over the past few years.
An idea-generating tool
However we do not wish this top 50 to be a sort of “museum” of past initiatives but rather a tool for airline professionals to generate new ideas. We hope that by viewing such a wide variety of outstanding initiatives in a single slide deck, other marketers will be inspired to create other new and innovative campaigns that will form the basis of future SimpliFlying Top 10s.

You will notice that each case study has a category indicator before its title. These indicators refer to the original top 10 that featured that particular case study, and have been included  to facilitate further research into the subject.
A year of top 10s
The list below provides links …

Last week, I delivered four speeches, sat on four panel discussions and ran two MasterClasses. It’s been quite an exhilarating experience speaking to multiple groups of senior aviation executives. And more than ever, just being a sponge and soaking up knowledge from the other speakers has been very rewarding as well.

One of my best received speeches this week was the one I delivered at the Low Cost Airlines World Asia Pacific at Singapore last week. Previously, we’ve spent quite a bit of time talking about the changing face of loyalty as social media takes root in the minds of customers. Late last year, we even did a three-part special series (download pdf) on LCCs and loyalty. The first part offered five compelling reasons to start thinking about loyalty. The second part provided three easy ways to track loyal customers. And the final part offered five nearly no-cost solutions to drive loyalty.

In this presentation, I presented a culmination of our thoughts on this issue and presented the thesis that light-weight loyalty programs based on social advocacy bear immense opportunities for low-cost carriers. Since many of …

In marketing, we often talk about the value of brand associations, of being at the top of the mind of consumers and having the brand instantly connect with a feeling, memory etc. However, putting all this into practice is probably one of the hardest things in the industry. According to researchers, there can only be 3 brands in of a consumer per category… don’t believe me?
A short brand-recognition exercise
Let’s do a little exercise: name 3 brands of Cola.

Now let me guess: The first one that you thought of was: Coca Cola? And maybe the color red? The second one was: Pepsi, perhaps? And the third one?  Maybe you struggled a bit with this one, but probably it was the top selling “white label” brand from your local supermarket

Let’s do one more:

Think of good times (or more specifically, the recent holiday season) and name a brand of soft drinks.

I guess that you probably thought of something similar to the image below:

One last test:
Can you think of the holiday season and an airline/airport in the same breath?

Having troubles? Well it’s understandable since no airline …

We promised we’d make the New Year exciting for you. And here we are – delivering on the promise we made! After creating quite a buzz with our revamped SimpliFlying Heroes initiative that saw almost 3000 votes pour in over just a week, we’re back with something even more exciting. So sit back, relax and enjoy the show that we’re bringing you today (and every fortnight hereon)!

Today, we’re launching SimpliFlying Podcasts – a brand new product that should excite our readers, most of whom are travel marketers. Starting this Wednesday, SimpliFlying will be releasing Marketing Strategy podcasts for airline and airport marketers on the 1st and 3rd Wednesday of each month. Each podcast will have great insights on the latest in marketing from the best minds in aviation.
Why you should listen to the podcasts
Helmed by Shashank Nigam, the CEO of SimpliFlying, every fortnight we will interview a well-known face from the world of aviation (mostly CxO level). The in-depth interviews will be followed by a detailed discussion of insights into the latest in airline and airport marketing by SimpliFlying staff.

The podcasts will be available …

I recently had the opportunity to write a feature article in the Airline Passenger Experience Magazine, led by none other than Jon Norris and Mary Kirby, of the Runway Girl fame.

The article explored in a detailed fashion the behavior of the frequent traveler of today, who is not only always connected, but always engaging too. And what airlines are currently doing to respond. It then goes on to forecast the upcoming trends and what airlines need to do to stay relevant.

You’ll find our social loyalty infographic integrated into the article, as well as some cutting edge case studies like Estonian Air’s new social loyalty program and Air New Zealand. This complements well the recent series of articles written by Shubhodeep recently on why LCCs should seriously think about loyalty programs.

Enjoy the read, and we’d love your comments!
The Future of loyalty  
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The past year has been an interesting and very successful one for Simpliflying with a number of new client acquisitions and tons of exciting free resources such as infographics and Top 10 case-packs posted regularly to the blog amongst other things. At the brink of the new year, we relive ten of the most popular articles on SimpliFlying in 2011:

10. Social seating: Have you read about the Malaysian Airline initiative that led the airline to create a much talked about Facebook booking engine that allowed people to sit with their friends on the airline’s flights?

9. Airports in social media: In the ninth place we have a Top 10 case-pack, an initiative helmed by our Senior Innovation Officer Shubhodeep Pal, on how airports have driven engagement trough social media.

8. Blockbuster social initiative: Next, in 8th place we find one, if not the, most successful social media campaigns of 2011, the AA Advantage “mystery miles” campaign that hit the headlines in February by achieving an 84 fold growth of its Facebook fans in 54 hours.

7. Airline Twitter initiatives: In the seventh place we find …