Skift Take
There are floors full of marketing folks and techies at Expedia, Booking.com, United, and American Airlines who are measuring whether consumers click faster on the yellow button or the red banner. Can airline websites afford to be cheerleader, confidante, and payment processor simultaneously? Very doubtful.
Airlines have a problem: They are pretty good at selling flights, but they fail again and again when it comes to inspiring travel, and selling related products, from hotels to vacation packages, and bottles of booze.
Enter Jay Sorensen, a former director of marketing at Midwest Airlines, a consultant, and the president of IdeaWorksCompany, which recently published Finding the Path to Fix Airline Retail.
Describing it as "typical," Sorensen said among all travelers who book flights directly from JetBlue, only about 1.4 percent add a JetBlue Vacation. And easyJet gets merely 2.5 percent of flight bookers tacking on a hotel, he says.
"Airline websites are great at conducting transactions; they simply are lousy salespeople," Sorensen says.
Allegiant and Jet2.com are exceptions to the rule.
Both position themselves as travel companies rather than airlines per se, sell a high percentage of vacation packages, and "are fully devoted to the sale of accommodations and services by going above and beyond merely having these items available for sale," Sorensen says.
Jet2.com has "hundreds" of staff located in resort destinations to deal with passengers at the airport and hotels, and to sell them more services. Allegiant flies planes but also acts as a tour operator, contracts for hotel rooms, and is building a Florida resort, he says.
Storytelling and Inspiration
Sorensen argues that "to compete online, airlines should establish a presence at every step in a travel storytelling process from choosing to travel, inspiration and taking action."
Sorensen takes his point of view a step further, and advocates that the websites of airlines, which to a great extent excommunicated Main Street travel agents a couple of decades ago, should emulate and woo their castoff former partners. Travel advisors recognize, he says, that the origins of a vacation may bubble up years before a trip, and they can h
