Omnevo has partnered with with inflight digitalisation specialist airfree to take the omnichannel experience into a new channel.
By reaching the customer in the comfort of their seat, Omnevo and airfree hope to expand the inflight retail experience and open up powerful new revenue opportunities for airlines.
The first rollout of the new joint platform was launched on Singapore Airlines (SIA) in collaboration with KrisShop, SIA’s flagship retailer, in June 2021 and is being expanded across the airline’s Thales-enabled Airbus A350 fleet.
Omnevo’s inflight expansion of its single-platform strategy through airfree’s onboard expertise aims to provide an inter-connected, uninterrupted customer experience across the whole passenger journey, enabling KrisShop to host what is believed to be the largest inflight retail offering ever seen in the industry.
The extended, holistic reach of the Omnevo platform now enables customer engagement at any journey point, including pre-order, inflight shopping, post-flight and loyalty shopping as part of a single, cohesive shopping and entertainment inflight experience.
Onboard SIA, for example, passengers gain inflight ‘live’ access to KrisShop’s offerings, with a curated selection of over 4,000 products ranging from beauty and fragrances to electronics and liquor, as well as exclusive KrisShop and SIA merchandise. SIA passengers can shop from the comfort of their seat during their flight, supported by convenient delivery options, including to their homes almost anywhere in the world, as well as to upcoming SIA flights.
airfree’s semi-embedded technology enables airlines to update the content of their servers before every flight, thereby reducing satellite connection costs and optimising bandwidth usage (whereby live inflight connectivity need only be utilised during the checkout phase), to ensure a fast, smooth and seamless experience for passengers.
“As airlines seek to recover from the greatest revenue crisis in aviation history, the inflight revenue opportunity has been revolutionised through a powerful, proven path to higher revenue,” said Michael Raasch, CEO of Omnevo. “With this newly expanded platform for KrisShop, we have demonstrated how leading airlines can bridge the industry’s pivotal gap in the targeting of the inflight customer by placing the digital shopping experience right in front of them, in the seatback. The decades-old conundrum of how to fully exploit the ‘captive’ inflight audience and actually deliver the revenue-driving potential of IFE can now be resolved through a dedicated, cutting-edge online shopping experience.
“Consumer digital adoption was greatly accelerated in the crisis and airlines must respond with a stronger customer experience across all journey points, including, crucially, in the air. This extension of our single, connected, tailored platform opens up viable, cost-effective new routes to recovery not only for FSCs but also for LCCs. Digitalisation is the only way to grow ancillary revenue in this turbulent market and seize a lasting competitive advantage.”
