As the world becomes really engaged with e-commerce and it becomes an everyday item, we’re seeing huge problems with fraud and fraudulent transactions, and people are now wary about how they buy and where they buy from. They’re not going to be so gung-ho about clicking any link. They’re looking to buy from trusted brands and in environments where they know the transaction will happen, and that if anything goes wrong, they will get the follow-up and aftercare they need.
Trusted brands
Interestingly, airlines have earned that trust and have a little bit of power with consumers, and we see that as airlines look to increase their ancillary revenue, there are big opportunities for them to become retailers – not just during the flight, but before and afterwards too.
So, there is potential to move beyond just the standard buying booze on both ends – booze to take on holiday and to buy on the way back – to pushing this into normal, everyday e-commerce.
So, you use that platform to become an e-commerce environment, like a department store, or Amazon. Then you can start curating products. For example, airlines could say to their passengers ‘You’ve just been to Spain, here’s some Spanish wine’, or ‘We know you like this wine, why not buy a crate of it and we can deliver it to you?’.
And then you can look at the concept in terms of loyalty programmes and building up points, and spending points within the airline’s own eco-system.
Strategic shift
At dnata, we see retail on board as the starting point for a much more engaged, holistic experience. The hard bit is joining all the systems, and that’s where we’re investing.
For years at dnata it was just catering and a little bit of retail, but now if you look at our logo it says ‘dnata Catering & Retail’. We’re being quite deliberate about it.
Airlines are telling us they want to be able to sell to customers, and not just standard ticket seats and bags. They want to offer them pre-order at home, where they can have products delivered to their seat without the trolley coming anywhere near them, and to be able to sell to them post trip too.
We’ve been upskilling ourselves, getting all of our back-of-house systems sorted, sorting out any tax and duty free issues, and once you’ve got that, everything else is super easy.
We’ve got an IT support team of 3,000 people and we think that’s going to be our secret resource. We can make sure airlines have the right product, the right merchandising, map it through and get the supply chain working.
