When I was thinking about what the first article and podcast in 2021 should be, the choice was quite easy. It had to be the 2021 travel industry outlook – more specifically, a look into the future of travel distribution. Why? The first reason is that everybody is intrigued with how the future of travel distribution and retailing will look, especially in the post-pandemic world. The second reason...
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“You’re actually writing about positive airline digital trends for 2021?” This was the question my colleague asked me when he saw my draft for this article. I think he thought I was going crazy. It all started a few weeks ago when I was sitting in my home office, Week 7 of lockdown and homeschooling. I was trying hard to think of a positive story to write for...
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Should airlines invest more (or less) in digital during the pandemic? In the past, I’ve written about how marketers see COVID-19 as a driver of change and emphasize the role of digital innovation during the pandemic. But to be honest, it's easy for me to say that, as I'm not running an airline during the biggest crisis our industry has ever seen. This is why I wanted...
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Do you want to know the quickest way to make your customers mad? Make them think you know nothing about how they feel or what their real problem is. In my case, I would start this article like this: "In these unprecedented times, because of the new coronavirus...
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Building a great digital experience is all about understanding your users. We've been beating the drum about how agile airline UX research should be the core element of your optimization process even way before COVID-19 hit us. I've written about how Ryanair is doing airline UX research at scale and how Virgin Atlantic built their user-centric digital optimization team. However, one can argue that COVID-19 changed your users’...
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"Data is the new oil" was probably one of the most popular airline clichés before COVID-19 hit. A data-driven airline definitely sounds smart, but can a data-driven approach help with airline recovery? Boston Consulting Group (BCG), one of the world's most renowned consultancy companies, definitely thinks so. They are stressing a data-driven approach as one of the key elements of recovery in their “Post-COVID-19 Flight Plan for...
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In last week's travel analytics insights, I showed you how COVID-19 changed our travel planning strategies. My plan this week was to continue the narrative using the same Skyscanner flight search data and present insights about conversion rates. However, something interesting caught my eye, and I decided to leave the topic of conversion rates for the next episode. What happened? [caption id="attachment_9254" align="alignright" width="285"] Source: Eamonn Brennan, EUROCONTROL[/caption] EUROCONTROL...
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If you follow Diggintravel, you've heard a lot lately about experimentation and how we think it's the key to building modern airline digital products. But to be fair (even though I'm a huge fan of experimentation), it's not the only experimentation that matters. The key to building modern airline digital products is to combine experimentation with an agile, data-driven, customer-centric approach. These are the core principles we...
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Last weekend I was enjoying a short holiday break visiting a friend in Croatia. Seeing many tourists enjoying the summer, I started to wonder how far in advance they were planning their holidays this year since COVID-19 changed our behavior in so many ways. Personally, I am more spontaneous, and I’m making on the spot decisions for (mostly) shorter trips this year. But how about others?...
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"It's GREAT… BUT I don't think it's the right time to invest in airline marketing education." "Looks really COOL… BUT unfortunate timing as most airlines have cut their training budget." You've probably seen that we just launched a brand new Airline Digital Retailing Academy. During the design phase, I reached out to more than 100 different airline professionals to get their feedback. I wanted to hear what airline...
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