I delivered a speech today at the Airline Retail Conference 2012 in Singapore, around the topic of driving revenues and engaging customers using the latest in-flight entertainment and connectivity technologies. The focus was around leveraging three key shifts:

Gadgets in-flight – personal and those supplied by the airlines
The connected traveler – and how to drive engagement and revenue
Learning from other retail models – in this case Kuala Lumpur International Airport and Tesco in Korea

Sharing here my Prezi presentation. The recorded video will be available soon too, so please do check back!

The future of in-flight enternainment and technology on Prezi

(Photo Credit: Sergio Mello, Satisfly)

Note: Earlier this month, we announced a revamp of the SimpliFlying Heroes initiative, giving our readers a greater say in whom we choose by adopting a transparent voting system. In a keenly contested round that saw about 3000 votes pour in over the course of a week, Pooja Dua of SpiceJet emerged the winner, having received almost half of the total votes submitted! Read more about SpiceJet’s excellent social media initiative led by Pooja below.

Even though India is the world’s fastest-growing domestic market in aviation, it is not yet known for airlines that are superstars in engaging or offering customer service via social media. Or at least, until now. Last year, SpiceJet, a leading domestic low-cost carrier in India, launched the Bombardier Q400 in a market that’s traditionally sceptical and scared of flying turboprops (popularly classified as the “planes with fans outside”).  What’s more, they chose the untested waters of social media for propelling their route-launch and tasted tremendous success, achieving over 88% load-factor in the first two weeks itself. Moreover, they also earned countless new fans, followers and increasing engagement manifold on their social media channels. So how did they achieve this? We reached out to …

Update: The campaign has been featured on Facebook Studio and also shortlisted for the Shorty Awards!
Airlines these days are chasing the elusive return on social media. And while the number of “likes” or “followers” and video views are all the rage, it’s ultimately the return on investment (ROI) that matters the most. About a year ago, AAdvantage ran possibly the most viral Facebook campaign for an airline – fans grew almost 100X in just 54 hours. But ROI numbers were not necessarily as impressive.
Now, COPA Airlines from Panama has numbers to prove a 50X ROI from their recent Facebook app – an effort for which Diego Quesada Grimaldo, their eCommerce Director, was nominated for the SimpliFlying Heroes Award last month!

Pasaporte America to promote destinations
To promote its network in the Americas, COPA recently held a Passport America sweepstakes, asking the public to tell the airline which 10 destinations they’d like to visit first if they were the winner. Participants could explore each of COPA Airlines’ 59 destinations on the map, and then select their favourite 10. One person won a trip for two to all of COPA’s 59 destinations.

The Facebook-centric campaign (app no …

Over the last year, SimpliFlying went pretty big with infographics. Big both in terms of the issues we tackled and the buzz we generated. We scored especially huge hits with our social future of loyalty and resources dedicated to social media infographics, apart from the regular Monthly Airlines on Twitter Report published in partnership with Eezeerdatalab.

And now, we’re kicking off the New Year with a bang as we present a new infographic, in partnership with our friends at Eyefortravel, on a burning issue that airlines and travel marketers in general will be looking to tackle over the next twelve months. Two questions in particular are addressed in this infographic:

In what direction does the industry see social media evolving?
What business goals travelers are driving and if they’re calculating ROI

While we do seem to have a consensus on the answer to the first question – the future is certainly mobile – uncertainty remains about how to measure ROI on social media. (We’ve tackled this briefly in a previous infographic as well). The uncertainty looms large primarily because while there are divergent ways in which people do measure ROI, there is also a section that questions the need to …

Lessons from a cafe in Argentina
In my keynote speeches, I like to share the example of a cafe in Argentina that was in a dilemma about whether to charge for wifi or not. They had the option of charging for wifi, giving it free for a while then charging for it or not charging Instead of going down the conventional route, they did something different.

The cafe finally did something that’s called “flip-thinking”, in which they now give you free-flow coffee, and you pay by the hour for being in the cafe and using their “free wi-fi” and power outlets.

There are lessons here to be learnt for airlines from Urban Station, I’d highly encourage you to check them out next time you’re in Buenos Aires.

The challenge of making revenues from in-flight wifi
The recent IPO filing by in-flight wifi provider shows an abysmal usage rate of less than 5%. That means out of 100 passengers on a flight who have access to wifi, only 5 pay to log on. Typically, wifi costs $12.95 for a 24 hour period on Gogo.

At this adoption rate, despite the growth, …

It’s now a well known fact that social media is revolutionizing travel distribution, as we shared in our recent Top 10 Case Study pack. While Delta Air Lines was the first to introduce booking on Facebook almost two years ago, it was Malaysian Airline’s  MHBuddy initiative which went a step further and allowed passengers to sit next to their Facebook friends (or avoid them!).

In late 2012, Alaska Airlines’ FlyingSocial became the first to allow you to click on a map with your friends’ profile pics on it and click on them to book a ticket to their city, as I’ve shared in a number of my keynote presentations.
Germanwings’ FriendsFlight app
Now, with the help of our friends over at SparkLoft Media, Germanwings has introduced an app that allows you to book ticket based on your friends location in Facebook, through an app called FriendsFlight. The application, which lives on Facebook, sorts Germanwings airfare results by price, geographical distance or Facebook friends.

Integrating the social graph in booking
This app is part of a trend where airlines are socializing the booking process. It started with something simple …

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 …

What a year it has been for the airline industry when it comes to marketing. With healthier profits this year, we’ve seen many airlines push the envelop when it comes to marketing and social media innovation. So to sum up the year, we’re sharing the top 11 marketing innovations by airlines in 2011.

While going through these, you’ll also realize that most of those that made the list aren’t one-off campaigns, but mature strategies made up of tactics that drive very specific business goals. So gone are the days of fluffy, one-off social-media campaigns with questionable ROI. Hope these inspire you for 2012!

Estonian Air social loyalty program: AirScore, the airline’s groundbreaking, yet simple, loyalty program rewards travelers for online advocacy. You earn virtual points on Facebook for sharing a trip report or booking through the airline’s Facebook app. And these can be redeemed for simple privileges like fast-security lane access. In 10 days, the program generated over a million impressions on Facebook, more than the number of passengers carried by the airline in a year! It’s now won three global awards in three months. Read more… (airlinetrends.com)
SpiceJet Bombardier …

I had the opportunity to deliver a presentation and a MasterClass at the ACI Airport Exchange in Abu Dhabi, on the road ahead for social media for airports around the world.

While I focused on key business goals like driving customer service and non-aeronautical revenue, I shared case studies from this year’s SimpliFlying Award winner London Gatwick and nominee Changi, among others. During the half-day MasterClass, I shared in-depth case studies and gave the participants a feel of how using free tools like socialmention.com and Geochirp.com can make their job easy when trying to engage customers.

I share with you here my Prezi presentation from the conference. A video recording will be posted up soon as well. Would love your comments on this.
 

ACI on Prezi

We’ve partnered with our good friends at Eyefortravel to bring you another interesting infographic that reveals a lot about how social media is significantly impacting the travel industry. (Thanks to eezeerdatalab for additional data.) While we’ll leave you to pore over the infographic to get the  juicier details, there are a few interesting insights that do stand out and deserve to be highlighted.

Travel marketers surveyed revealed that using social media reduced PR costs by at least 24%.
Most companies in the travel industry are spending over 25% of their marketing budget on social media.
61% of companies surveyed will spend more money on social media efforts over the next quarter.
Interestingly, social media is being seen as a viable way to drive customer loyalty given that almost 82% of frequent flyers use Facebook and place the most importance on great customer service. (Check out our previous infographic on how the future of loyalty programs will be powered by social media.)
Airlines are increasingly taking to performing customer service on social media as almost 86% of tweets to airlines are about customer service issues.
There’s an increasing investment in social media platforms to engage customers. About 191 airlines now have Twitter accounts …