The Value of Fare Marketing for a Low-Cost Carrier (LCC) Digital Strategy

Four Low-Cost Carriers share their marketing strategies to attract and convert customers

Low Cost Carriers (LCCs) offer affordable travel options to attract customers, who now have more choices than ever when it comes to travel. OTAs have disrupted the industry by aggregating and commoditizing airlines to attract LLC customers.

PROS customers Frontier, Flyadeal, Play, and Volaris, joined us at Outperform for a panel discussion on how LCCs can maximize their competitive advantage and grow their direct channel.

Post-COVID, Frontier has seen a change in the way that their customers are traveling and how often. The airline has developed products and services to meet the new demand to visit friends and family, like their “GoWild! All-You-Can-Fly-Pass” which is a pass for a year or a season that covers all flights, the customer just needs to pay taxes.

PROS products enable Frontier to manage an average of three sales per week with a small team. The airline uses Offer Marketing across all touch points, from audience acquisition, conversion, building loyalty. They partner with PROS to market their low fares, and these passes to reach customers, convert them, and have them keep returning. Frontier values customer loyalty because they can better deliver on customer interests and reduce the cost of acquiring new customers.

Frontier explains how PROS products bridge communications between their Marketing and Revenue Management teams, and how they are taking advantage in renewed travel demand:

“We rely on PROS for the personalization that it offers. With PROS we can offer a dynamic fare in one of our channels that customers can click on and convert with right away. They don’t have to go hunting for the fare, we lead them right to the fare that they’ve seen in the ad, which is critical to build trust with the customer.”

Tyri Squyres
VP of Marketing, Frontier
 

Volaris is the largest carrier in Mexico, where 70% of the market is dominated by Ultra Low-Cost Carriers (ULCCs). Volaris has a strategy to attract people who have never flown before, who often take long bus rides to travel to destinations. The airline has found that once these passengers try flying for the first they don’t want to go back to the bus, 80% will want to keep flying.

See what Volaris’ Head of Marketing had to say about their acquisition strategies as the largest LCC in Mexico:

“PROS products are scalable and enable our customers to help other customers find the low prices, because when somebody finds a really low price it will stay on the airTRFX pages so they can go exactly the date and the route where the low prices are now.”

Daniel Gelemovich
Director of Marketing and Digital, Volaris

flyadeal is the only LCC out of Saudi Arabia and has positioned itself as the “Fly For Less” airline, with a commitment to customers that if they book 14 days in advance flyadeal will be the cheapest for their. flyadeal doesn’t run weekly or monthly promotions, instead opting for a National Day campaign where they sell $10 fares.

Using demand data generated by FareNet, flyadeal’s Marketing and Revenue Management tams can collaborate to optimize inventory management and sales by route. Because more than 90% of sales come from the website the airline is able to use the demand on the website to improve fares.

Hear how flyadeal uses Offer Marketing to drive demand and conversions, and what they think the future of AI will be for their industry:

“We use PROS airSEM for acquisition of new traffic, we use Custom Pages from airTRFX to make sure that the journey from ad to acquisition is seamless. If you don’t have the entire stack of Offer Marketing products you will never be able to retain the customer starting from acquisition until retention, so there will always be gaps. PROS Offer Marketing Platform will bridge your gaps along with your other complementary ad tech or CX products.”

Surya Kuchibotla
Head of e-commerce and Distribution, Flyadeal

Play is a new LCC brand coming into the marketplace and competing with much larger European and North American carriers. They must also compete against European low-cost carriers with routes to their home market and connections via Reykjavik into the U.S. or into Europe.

Using PROS products, Play has been able to collaborate across departments, from Revenue Management and Pricing to the Digital Development team in order to use demand data to implement sales tactics at scale across multiple markets quickly without restrictions. Having the tools to market real-time dynamic pricing across multiple markets has helped their teams execute more strategically and given the new airline confidence in its growth trajectory.

Play shares how Offer Marketing products have enabled them to drive acquisition through their direct channel and increase brand awareness:

“As a new LCC, aggressive low fare marketing absolutely underpins what we do day to day commercially. The partnership with PROS is fundamental to that. We have a limited amount of funding in terms of our marketing, so we use Offer Marketing as a key pillar to make our money as efficient and economical as possible.”

Adrian Keating
Executive Director, Commercial, Play

Watch the full LCC session