Drive Loyalty Program Membership by Promoting Future Travel

Summary

With air travel greatly reduced due to COVID-19, Thai Airways wanted to encourage immediate flight booking for future travel, as well as promote their loyalty program. Thai decided to run a 60th Anniversary promotion where they offered their rewards program members three times the miles for flights they booked during the promotion for trips between December 2020 and March 2021.

Thai used airTRFX Custom Pages to make relevant landing pages for the campaign with real-time fares. The campaign was promoted across their channels including email, push notifications, and social media. The two day promotion earned TBH 6.7 Million (USD 207K) and drew a total of 22,500 sessions on the promotion’s landing pages. Right: Thai Airways airTRFX Custom Page for their two day 60th Anniversary promotion to encourage future travel bookings by offering additional rewards miles.

Drive Website Traffic to Custom Pages with Campaigns

Thai Airways used the Campaign Tool in airTRFX to add a Campaign image of the 60th Anniversary Promotion across their website. A Campaign can be an image, text, video, or custom code that is placed anywhere on any page. Campaigns are scheduled to be visible for a set number of days and can include blackout dates when they should not appear. Using this tool, Thai Airways linked the campaign image to relevant Custom Pages and was able to easily deploy, and then remove, the campaign image across their website.

Custom Pages to Convert Visitors

The Campaign image was placed on all of the airline’s airTRFX pages and linked to a Custom Page where visitors could view the available routes in the travel window. Thai Airways utilized airTRFX Custom Pages to create relevant landing pages for the promotion based on the user’s language and market currency. he total revenue from the airTRFX Custom Page reached TBH 6.7 million (USD 207K) in only two days and brought in a total of 22.5K sessions.

Email, App & Push Notifications

Thai Airways integrated the airTRFX Custom Pages in their email marketing campaigns to drive customers to pages where they would be able to find real-time fares for flights included in the promotion.

The email (top right) also contained a link to enroll in the rewards program, so users on the email list that wanted to participate in the promotion could easily enroll and book their trip. Thai Airways’ email channel performed  particularly well with a conversion rate of 3.3% and brought in 60% of the revenue from the promotion (TBH 4 million).

To complete their Promotional Campaign, the airline linked airTRFX pages to push notifications enabled in their airline app and on their website (bottom right). This way, all website visitors and users who have downloaded the airline’s app received a message promoting the miles sale and could instantly click and be directed to a mobilefriendly airTRFX page where they could see the latest low fares for the route or destination they selected.

Conclusion

Thai Airways chose to use their 60th Anniversary promotion to offer Loyalty Program members miles at a discounted rate to encourage them to buy now for a future trip. By doing this, the airline was able to obtain ancillary revenue immediately while their ticket sales are low, and passengers will use the miles down the road when conditions are more stable. By selling discounted miles to Rewards Members, airlines can increase customer loyalty and encourage new customers to become Rewards Members if they see discounts for miles and are given a good reason to sign up and purchase. A holistic Fare Marketing strategy was able to drive traffic and conversions even in the midst of a global crisis, with web site traffic and email performing especially well.

PROS Products

AIRTRFX
Create a Fare Marketing infrastructure with airTRFX. Leverage airTRFX pages to scale your site, online presence, and improve engagement.

AIRMODULES
Conversion-oriented flight search tools with real-time fares that can be deployed on any web page.

AIRSEM
Airline-specific Search Engine Marketing tools to build, launch, and manage ad campaigns with real-time fares in ad copy.

AIRWIRE
Display real-time fares on social media, emails, retargeting ads, and on any webpage with airWire. Powered by user-search data without additional calls to your GDS/Res System.