Why Are Airline Websites So Bad at Inspiring Travel?
Photo Credit: Do airlines need to get more inspirational or merely focus on bookings? It can be a dilemma. Allegiant Air does it better than most. Allegiant Air
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
