In today’s competitive airline industry, it’s clear that offering just a seat on a plane isn’t enough. This conference session delves into the strategic benefits of combining hotels and vacation packages with flights. It’s a forward-looking approach that promises to enrich the travel experience for passengers while unlocking additional revenue opportunities for airlines via ancillaries. Through this integration, airlines have a unique chance to go beyond transportation and play a key role in crafting memorable journeys.
United Vacations and Ya Vas share their tactics to increase awareness of the vacation packages they offer and what challenges they face to increase customer acquisition.
Ya Vas
“We use airTRFX landing pages as part of our brand awareness strategy. These landing pages give us authority and coverage on the internet so that we’re ranking for our search keywords and connecting clients to our offers.”
– Ana Isabel Chavez,
Manager of Marketing & Digital – YaVas
Ya Vas is a vacation packages brand launched by Volaris Airlines in 2019. It provides travelers with everything they need to book for their trip, including hotels, transfers, insurance, and experiences. Volaris has successfully used airTRFX since 2016, using these landing pages to drive customer acquisition and conversion for their flights. When launching Ya Vas, the airline chose to utilize airTRFX pages again to optimize visibility for their new vacation brand, as well as create SEO interlinking between both businesses.
Ya Vas launched airTRFX custom pages to showcase their vacation offers and to drive conversion for their numerous digital campaigns. Ana Isabel Chavez, Manager of Marketing & Digital, explains “airTRFX allows us to easily create very flexible custom pages to use in any campaign. For example, our campaign and custom page for Las Vegas has increased our bookings there by 63% in one year, and our average room rate in Las Vegas has increased 49%.”
See what Ya Vas had to say on the panel for Ancillaries &> Vacation Packages
United
“I recommend just getting your hands dirty in the airTRFX tool and building the pages. It’s been easy to use and I’ve had a lot of ideas spark just by trying things out with custom pages, and that’s been really helpful.”
– Grant Ruckheim
Senior Analyst Ancillary Products – United Airlines
While United Airlines has established brand recognition, their vacation packages brand did not. AirTRFX landing pages help increase brand recognition and are designed to drive traffic to booking engines. Grant Ruckheim admits, “While traffic directly from the United Mobile app or.com was really beneficial to the product, partnering with airTRFX was kind of a no-brainer. United was already working with airTRFX to boost SEO for flights. So, it kind of became a no-brainer for us to work with airTRFX for our vacation packages. We’ve seen over the last six months that the organic traffic to our airTRFX pages for packages has steadily increased and it’s been consistently improving.”
United has been using airTRFX since 2017 to increase visibility of their network with SEO and drive customer acquisition for their flights. By combining this tactic for their vacation packages, United can incorporate booking modules for vacation packages onto their existing airTRFX pages for flights. For example, when a customer searches “flights to Cancun” and finds the United airTRFX page for that destination, they can see an actual live price for a hotel plus a flight as well as images of the hotel properties.
In addition to coupling flights and hotels for destinations, these airTRFX pages can also be used to increase awareness of promotions, Grant Ruckheim explains, “airTRFX has been really easy to use. I’ve been able to just go in and schedule banners that help promote things like sweepstakes or paid campaigns for that bring in some additional traffic.”
United Vacations has also used airTRFX to launch custom pages for capturing high funnel traffic for people that are searching at the exploration phase of their trip. These pages are designed for customers search queries without clear destinations or brand words like, “ski destination vacations” or “family friendly vacations”. United has launched airTRFX custom pages designed for SEO performance for those types of search queries and has found quick success in traffic acquisition using this strategy.
See what United had to say on the panel for Ancillaries & Vacation Packages
