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 …

During a lot of conferences I speak at, the discussions are around what the ROI of social media is, for airlines. While we have addressed this through our multiple case studies of how airlines drive revenue and results through social media, one of the best examples of this recently has been the Indian budget airline – SpiceJet. They launched the Bombardier Q400 in India for the first time on regional routes and managed to achieve an 88% load factor in the first two weeks of operations after primarily reaching out to customers about the new product through social media.

It started out as an up-hill task, because Indians have typically not been the most keen to fly turbo-props and battling this mindset was the biggest challenge. Moreover, SpiceJet wasn’t flying these planes on major routes like Delhi-Mumbai, but secondary cities like Hyderabad-Goa – and there was a need to create destination awareness in specific segments.

The strategy developed leveraged on potential travelers educating one another about the new aircraft and learning about destinations – all through a series of contests on Facebook and Twitter….

It’s official. We are proud to bring you the world’s first tweetup on an aircraft thanks to the kind folks at Bombardier. And not just any aircraft. It’s the Bombardier Q400, painted in airBaltic colours, we are talking about! Not only that, we are throwing in free beer and munchies generously sponsored by the Bombardier team. Can it get any better? Probably not. Even though this tweetup is by invitation only, if you are heading down to the Airshow this Friday from 3.30 – 5.00pm (which means you have an Airshow trade pass), be sure to pop by the tweetup venue. For those who don’t have a trade pass, fret not. There are up to five places up for grabs. Here’s how you can win a place in this exclusive event. Just 3 steps: 1. Create a video or picture to express your desire to join this tweetup, on why YOU must be there 2. Upload it to YouTube or Flickr 3. Send @SimpliFlying a tweet and tag it with #SIN10 to notify us that your video or picture is up The top 5 most viewed video or image would be …