Personalisation is a much-used term within the inflight industry. Going way beyond whether a passenger prefers an aisle or window seat, personalisation is a way of maximising customer satisfaction and, in the long term, generating revenue.
Giving passengers options is not the same as true personalisation, which involves tailoring experiences to suit individuals’ expressed preferences.
Within the onboard retail space, enabling passengers to order food, drink or items from onboard product catalogues whenever they want – rather than when cabin crew are rolling a trolley along the aisle – might improve the passenger experience but it’s not true personalisation. Nor is it when sales are made via personal electronic devices.
Cabin crew training in effective sales techniques and products, along with a natural ability to push an item and say the right things to close a sale, certainly help to personalise onboard sales, but technology is now taking personalisation to the next level.
Singapore Airlines’ KrisWorld inflight entertainment system, for example, offers passengers a curated online shopping experience. Over 4,000 products are available for sale and a selection is presented via seatback screens.
Partnering with an advertising agency and tailoring ads over the IFE system is a way of boosting revenue. Artificial intelligence is making that easier and more accurate than ever.
Having the right data means that the passenger experience can be adapted, as can the variety of products and services being offered. That could relate to the products made available or excluded from the retail offering, how a particular drink is served or promoting post-flight extras.
At your service
It’s now possible to offer passengers personalised directions to connecting flights, enabling effective and optimised navigation between gates. Seemingly intuitive help can be supplied too – for example, relating to onward transportation. Fulfilling a requirement they hadn’t thought about or hadn’t had an opportunity to book can generate ancillary revenue and boost satisfaction.
Passengers on El Al Israel Airlines can even order groceries while flying and have them delivered to their houses, ensuring they have fresh food and drink when they arrive home.
Oren Cohen Butansky, El Al Executive Vice President – Customer Experience and Sales, says answering call centre queries during the COVID-19 pandemic helped the airline gain a deeper knowledge of what passengers ask for. “Personalisation is to see the customer and understand their needs,” he says.
Loyalty counts
El Al has approximately six million passengers a year and four million of them are in the airline’s loyalty programme. It costs money to operate but the return on investment comes through passengers being willing to pay more in return for added value.
In terms of systematic approaches to personalising onboard experiences, loyalty programmes – and the data they help collate – are central. They allow pain points to be addressed. Preferences and sensibilities can also be recorded and leveraged to generate ancillary revenue.
Wirush Theparak, Head of Customer Experience and Product at Thai Airways, describes the airline’s loyalty programme as “the beginning of our ecosystem for personalisation”. It provides crew with useful insights and data that partners can utilise to supply products and services – potentially generating income for both parties.
Meanwhile, Mark Muren, Managing Director of Brand Identity, Product Marketing and Loyalty at United Airlines, says: “Personalisation is all about adapting the customer experience because of what we know about a person.”
Systematic data use can help customers make decisions and allow airlines to tailor more relevant options. Leveraged correctly, data helps deliver experiences that make passengers feel special, and that, of course, fosters brand loyalty.
However, Job Heimerikx, AirFi’s former CEO, warns that personalising onboard retail is difficult, partly because a passenger’s state of mind can vary according to the flight they’re on. “Additionally, using AI or similar tools requires vast amounts of data, which isn’t readily available. AI has actually proven ineffective in this context. No client has seen tangible improvements from its use,” he says.
He believes that aircraft rotations and largely inflexible processes for loading retail materials make it impossible to effectively personalise onboard sales. Yet tracking passengers’ interests via their own devices, and analysing the products or movies they interact with, enables a degree of personalisation through retail recommendations based on similar passengers’ interests.
