Picture this: You sign into a travel metasearch site, where it may know your zip code, gender, e-mail address and preferred alliances, and after conducting a flight query, an airline may return offers for free Wi-Fi, reduced rates for premium seats and bag fees, or perhaps an upgrade, all personalized for you.
Airlines have done a bunch to make personalized offers to their own loyalty program members through email marketing and some pledge to do likewise through direct-connects, but now they are pushing to take what they term “traveler authentication” to metasearch sites, where perhaps they can attract new customers and more efficient bookings.
The effort is all part of a new Open AXIS Group committee dubbed the Customer-Centric Meta-Search Working Group, which is being sponsored by flight and hotel metasearch company Hipmunk and has additional participation commitments from American Airlines, Air Canada, US Airways, United Airlines, Skyscanner, MindTree, Goldenware Travel Technologies and others.
“Hipmunk is the lead-sled dog on this and could get some first-mover advantage,” says Jim Young, executive director of the airline XML standards group, Open AXIS.
If tasking airlines and metasearch companies with the seemingly complex task of serving up personalized airline offers to travelers seems like pie-in-the sky, then Young counters that the organization already has been working on the initiative for a few months and hopes to see a beta in place with a couple of airlines and a metasearch company by March 2012.
The way Young envisions it, metasearch companies would furnish airlines with their users’ profile information — assuming consumers okayed such data-sharing — and then airlines would provide consumers with personalized offers for amenities or ancillary services, perhaps based on their zip codes or other data.
“Large carriers are getting carpet-bombed for search requests and they are not able to bring back anything, but the lowest fare,” Young says, adding they would love to have more information about who’s asking them for information so they can provide more relevant results and engage in more effective merchandising.
With such personalized merchandising, metasearch companies, such as allied members Hipmunk or Skyscanner, would benefit from increased conversions, Young says. Kayak is not part of Open AXIS and so far is not participating in the standards effort.
Asked about the initiative, John Gustafson, US Airways’ managing director of e-commerce and distribution, says, “We support traveler authentication, or more simply, delivering relevant products to customers at the right time.”
And, a spokeswoman for American Airlines confirmed it is “interested” in the working group and will indeed participate.
Young says the working group would create XML standards to accommodate traveler authentication for airline queries in metasearch, but that wouldn’t be where the heavy lifting would take place , and would amount to perhaps 20% to 40% of the group’s efforts. The XML standards would be published when completed.
However, the main focus of the working group would be on coming up with the business requirements for airlines and metasearch players to bring the proposition to life, Young adds, noting that deciding on how each airline would be able to merchandise their products would be high on the agenda.
Hipmunk, which is sponsoring the working group, “hasn’t decided on any particular products that would use personalized queries and certainly hasn’t decided on any timing,” says Adam Goldstein, Hipmunk co-founder. “The purpose of our attendance is to help understand what’s possible and then help formulate things that will make an even better experience for our users.”
This personalization push will be a key future direction, Goldstein says.
“We think personalized travel search is going to be increasingly important,” Goldstein says. “There’s no sense in showing people options that aren’t relevant to them and that we know they’d never want to take. That’s been our philosophy since the beginning and why we sort by ‘Agony’ to provide the best options. However, it’s relied entirely on business logic on our end. We look forward to potentially integrating what our users tell us they want with the APIs of our suppliers.”
Sounds like traveler data could be replacing business logic as a more effective and personalized marketing tack.
Hi Dennis,
Great coverage, this is a fine initiative, I applaud the Hipmunk team for taking the lead on building and alliance and getting the airlines involved. Personalized flight search is the right thing for consumers.
Note that Superfly launched a personalized flight search service last week (full disclosure, I am the founder of Superfly).
Looking forward to getting involved with these effort.
Cheers,
Jonathan
CEO Superfly
It’s not entirely clear to me how this benefits the airlines. The authentication/personalization, such as it is, seems to be done at the meta level, so the consumer will feel loyalty to the meta, not to the airline, especially if the freebie ancillary product/service is only available through the meta site (and that is not clear in this post nor in any of the Open Axis press so far).
Perhaps the argument could be made that this initiative will generate incremental revenue for the airlines, but as an employee of an SME with unmanaged corporate travel (but with status on several airlines) who generally books on brand.com after searching (but not clicking through) meta.com, I will switch to meta.com if I get free ancillary products and services from meta that I can’t get from airlines directly.
Seems to me that would increase airlines’ distribution costs while undermining the value of their own website. I must be missing something.
Valyn,
You know you’re not missing anything, but isn’t this a case of the airlines not being able to do this effectively themselves as well as the fact that most consumers want to use a meta, OTA or GDS or some type of shopping engine to compare pricing, and the more personalized the better?
Fascinating to me that the youngest guys in the room are the ones pushing the envelope on this very, very important issue. I can’t believe how often I get promo emails from airlines that seem to know where I fly from, but when I click through to their site, they seem to forget…
This initiative is meant to assist the airlines extend their merchandising capabilities to where “Buyers Buy” .
Customers want to buy off of the store shelves that work for them. Airlines want to be in the right place at the right time with the right product.
Today a large number of buyers use meta search tools to compare airlines and prices. But, the current practice of only showing the lowest avalable fare commoditizes the airline product in a marketplace where they are striving for more differentiation.
Today, you can get a one way fare on Frontier Airlines from DEN to SFO for $100. Did you know, however, that for $25 more you can get the same flight and 2 checked bags, a lower change fee, an upgrade to Stretch Seating for $5 and free DirectTV? Only if you went to the airline website, but that information is available in the pricing systems, and the GDS for sale by travel agents.
If this initiative does anything, it will at least move the yardsticks forward and create capaiblities for meta search companies to recognize product bundles that are offered by airlines at the same time as the lowest fare is displayed.
Traveler Authentication, takes things one step further and allows the airlines to extend the same capabilities of what they sell on their website to the other store shelves they sell on, based on knowing a little more about “who’s asking”.
What this initiative does for meta search companies is to set practices and the associated XML messages necessary to make it commercially viable and effective. It improves their conversion rate and delivers a more qualified customer to the airline.
For the airlines, a more qualified request gives them an opportunity to match a better product with a customer and get the sale.
Jim Young
Executive DIrector
OpenAXIS Group
This is terrific! Airlines would be able to offer their customers the Choice and Personalization through metasearch that they can offer on their own websites. Many customers want to use metasearch to compare airline fares so this sounds like a potential WIN-WIN-WIN (for airlines, metasearch, and customers).
Jonathan: SuperFly looks interesting from TLabs http://www.tnooz.com/2011/11/24/tlabs/superfly-mocks-kayak-with-launch-of-flight-search-and-loyalty-platform/ and your comments. Would I be correct that there is a difference between what you are trying to do and what Hipmunk may attempt to do.
You are taking the data you get from ITA and sorting results based on users’ rewards programs and preferences.
On the other hand, with Hipmunk and Open AXIS, the airlines would provide special merchandising offers that aren’t generally available based on users’ preferences in metasearch.
Fair?
Hi Dennis,
I think they are much closer than it may appear, as they both rely on knowing the user’s identity and needs (Open Axis refers to it as “market segment of one”) to provide better search and merchandising.
Superfly knows who the user is because we are already managing their various reward programs. We currently use that information to filter ITA and Everbread results to provide personalized search results. The logical next step is to offer the user special merchandising based on their profile.
This is a great initiative, and I think the end consumer has the most to gain.
Speaking as a member of the Open Axis Group – our company joined because we believe that the current generation of tools via the legacy GDS infrastructure is inadequate for today’s (and of course tomorrow’s) consumers. Today’s overall search process for airline products is fundementally flawed.
The consumer wants choice. And he wants to know what is a trustworthy result. In truth she/he has neither today. The choice is constrained by the legacy infrastructure and the trust is messed up by the fact that there are competing “right” answers. He doesn’t care what model the airline is: Low Cost, Legacy Network or Hybrid Value.
If these problems were truly solved we wouldn’t need metasearch would we? But these are very real issues and they are not going away any time soon – sadly enough – through the current infrastructure.
What I (and I think many other frequent leisure and biz travellers) want to see solved is that the customer get’s a trustworthy set of results that truly are matched to his requirements. I call this LDAA+:
Lowest Desireable Available Airfare + ancillaries that make sense for me.
This is highly subjective. As a Technology provider and a consultancy firm – wearing my 2 hats) this is therefore really tough to work. Impossible with the current tools but if the working group has the right mission and the right perspective then they can go along way to solving the problem of good search aka “find” via intermediaries.
This initiative is a good idea but needs to approach the problem holistically. To be clear, from both a service provider and as a consumer I am adamantly opposed to any effort that results in putting MORE lipstick on the pig – or any other animal for that matter
That is not the answer.
Cheers
[meta]-search isn’t the answer at all.
As a frequent traveler, I give up long before I find what I’m looking for most times, because the tools are all centered around searching. Why the hell should I spend my limited time acting as my own travel agent? Especially when pricing is so highly dependent on where you search, and the crazy volatility produced by yield management strategies.