How can travel marketing and flight search support passenger loyalty?

The best customers don’t just buy from you once. They come back time and time again, building lifetime value and boosting your airport’s revenue.

It’s a much-quoted statistic that it costs five times more to win a new customer than it does to retain an existing one, but it’s backed up by the fact that a 5% increase in customer retention correlates with at least a 25-95% increase in profit. And while a company has only a 5% to 20% chance of selling to a new customer, the likelihood of conversion rises to 60-70% for existing customers.

The best customer loyalty strategies create brand ambassadors who will build awareness and credibility by spreading the word about your products and services. This is important because 92% of consumers worldwide trust word-of-mouth recommendations from friends and family above all other forms of advertising.

Here are some more interesting stats about customer loyalty:

• 93% of customers will likely make repeat purchases with companies that offer excellent customer service.
• Around 50% of previously loyal customers have left a company for a competitor who was able to stay more relevant and better satisfy their needs.
• 33% of customers surveyed said they would consider switching companies immediately following a single instance of poor service.

These figures indicate that the best way to build customer loyalty and develop strong relationships with your airport passengers is to ensure they have a first-class experience across all touchpoints with your airport. Starting from the moment they land on your website, landing pages or social media page and continuously throughout the customer lifecycle.

Here we’ll show you how Rezcomm’s Flight Search Widget and Marketing modules will help you build passenger loyalty while sharing some of our top travel marketing tips for you to implement.

What is Flight Search?

Rezcomm’s Flight Search Widget enables customers to search and compare flights to their chosen destinations and book directly through your airport’s ecommerce platform. While increasing the visibility of flights and awareness of your booking services to unlock revenue generation, Flight Search also contributes to a positive passenger experience by giving customers more choices, all in the same place.

Using Flight Search to increase passenger loyalty

Using Rezcomm’s Flight Search Widget, customers can compare prices, book the best deals and remain in control of their journeys. Rezcomm Marketplace also makes booking flights easier for passengers with a simple, intuitive and secure platform where they can combine flights with hotel and holiday bookings, make reservations for parking, lounge and fast track tickets, and even pre-order food and retail to collect at the airport, all in one basket. It makes for a more enjoyable online booking experience and a seamless passenger experience at the airport.

Being able to book everything in one place with an airport’s end-to-end service improves customer trust and satisfaction, increasing the likelihood that passengers will return to book with your airport again in the future. What’s more, offering Flight Search and online travel products enables airports to gain valuable customer data, which they can use to personalise and improve their marketing and passenger experience – again, helping to build trust, increase loyalty and encourage passengers to return to spend more money with the airport again and again.

Travel marketing tips to support customer loyalty

As Victoria Wallace, Chief Digital Officer at Rezcomm, said in one of our Travel Marketing webinars, “it’s not necessarily natural for passengers to automatically know that they can buy their flight from the airport.”

Sean Staff, Marketing Consultant within the airport industry, agreed, “from our perspective, the battle is always that so many customers don’t know they can fly to all sorts of destinations from these regional airports. So for us, it starts with awareness from a travel marketing point of view. If you can get it right, get the awareness out and get the passengers in, then it’s just about that customer journey; making sure to support the customer every single step of the way through the booking process, before travel, at the airport and on return. If you can compliment a good passenger journey with strong destination and product marketing, you’re onto a winner.”

Make sure your Flight Search widget is highly visible
Both Victoria and Sean highlight the importance of increasing awareness of your flights and travel products, and one of the best ways to do that is with Rezcomm’s Flight Search Widget. Ensure the widget is highly visible on your airport website and landing pages, with a strong Call to Action button, encouraging passengers to book.

Create inspirational blog content and optimised landing pages
Another way you can increase awareness of Flight Search is by creating inspirational content about the destinations passengers can fly to on your airport blog. Consider also building dedicated landing pages for each destination, optimising them with your Flight Search Widget and a Call to Action button so that anyone who lands on your page from an organic search or paid advertisement can quickly and easily book.

Shout about flight bookings on social media
Social media campaigns are vital in raising awareness of your airport’s direct flight bookings. Remember, most people won’t initially think of booking flights with an airport. They will go to an online travel agent or airline instead. However, if they know they can book their entire journey with you, i.e. flights, hotels, parking, lounge, etc. and that you’ll take care of everything, it simplifies the process and makes it far more appealing to book with your airport – winning customers’ loyalty.

Create engaging content on social media showing customers where they can fly to and highlighting your latest offers. Use Rezcomm’s Social Media Scheduler to save time and automatically schedule your content in just a few clicks.

Use email marketing to target existing customers
Don’t assume that customers who have previously booked parking or airport lounge reservations with you will know they can also book flights with your airport. Instead, use Rezcomm’s email marketing module to tell them that they can book their entire journey with your airport the next time they want to go on holiday, including flights, hotels, holidays, parking, lounge, fast track, pre-order FAB, retail products and everything in between. Then, add an incentive – ‘thanks for booking parking with us, next time book flights & get 10% off.’ It’s a great way to raise awareness, gain customers’ loyalty and increase the chances of them spending more money with your airport.

Make sure your Flight Search widget is highly visible
Both Victoria and Sean highlight the importance of increasing awareness of your flights and travel products, and one of the best ways to do that is with Rezcomm’s Flight Search Widget. Ensure the widget is highly visible on your airport website and landing pages, with a strong Call to Action button, encouraging passengers to book.

Create inspirational blog content and optimised landing pages
Another way you can increase awareness of Flight Search is by creating inspirational content about the destinations passengers can fly to on your airport blog. Consider also building dedicated landing pages for each destination, optimising them with your Flight Search Widget and a Call to Action button so that anyone who lands on your page from an organic search or paid advertisement can quickly and easily book.

Shout about flight bookings on social media
Social media campaigns are vital in raising awareness of your airport’s direct flight bookings. Remember, most people won’t initially think of booking flights with an airport. They will go to an online travel agent or airline instead. However, if they know they can book their entire journey with you, i.e. flights, hotels, parking, lounge, etc. and that you’ll take care of everything, it simplifies the process and makes it far more appealing to book with your airport – winning customers’ loyalty.

Create engaging content on social media showing customers where they can fly to and highlighting your latest offers. Use Rezcomm’s Social Media Scheduler to save time and automatically schedule your content in just a few clicks.

Use email marketing to target existing customers
Don’t assume that customers who have previously booked parking or airport lounge reservations with you will know they can also book flights with your airport. Instead, use Rezcomm’s email marketing module to tell them that they can book their entire journey with your airport the next time they want to go on holiday, including flights, hotels, holidays, parking, lounge, fast track, pre-order FAB, retail products and everything in between. Then, add an incentive – ‘thanks for booking parking with us, next time book flights & get 10% off.’ It’s a great way to raise awareness, gain customers’ loyalty and increase the chances of them spending more money with your airport.

Increase customer loyalty with personalised marketing

Did you know 60% of consumers will likely become repeat buyers following personalised experiences? With this in mind, it’s time for your airport to prioritise personalisation in its travel marketing strategy to support passenger loyalty.

Of course, to personalise travel marketing and the passenger experience, you need access to your customer’s data and their marketing permissions. Your airport can achieve this by prompting customers to give their marketing permission at checkout. Even if this proves unsuccessful, or a customer arrives at your airport having not booked anything via your airport ecommerce website, you can still collect their marketing permissions with our WiFi Data Capture and KPI & Feedback Systems Deliver personalisation across all marketing channels and in a variety of ways, including:

• Targeted destination content and offers via email marketing
• Cross-sells and upsells during the booking journey and post-purchase
• Instant offers at the airport sent via SMS or push notifications
• Checking in with passengers via SMS at the airport to gather feedback
• Rewarding passengers with money-off products & services they’ve shown interest in

Personalisation will boost your airport marketing efforts, enabling you to drive more revenue from targeting passengers with the products, services and offers they’re most interested in. But it’ll also help your airport build strong relationships with its customers, who will feel like you know them as individuals and value the effort you put into creating a tailored experience, which will keep them loyal.

Reward customer loyalty

Trust is established when a passenger has a great experience at an airport. As a result, customers are more likely to book with the airport again and want the airport to take care of their journey from start to finish. But it never hurts to take the extra step to secure customer loyalty with a rewards scheme.

Rezcomm has a Loyalty and Rewards module which makes building a unique loyalty, reward or referral scheme for airports easy. We’ll implement your preferences and rules to create specific reward workflows tailored to your business.

Gatwick Airport Customer Loyalty Case Study
Gatwick Airport is an excellent example of an airport that uses its rewards to increase passenger loyalty and raise awareness of its flight bookings. Previously it ran a campaign that offered free fast track to passengers who booked directly with the airport to thank them for their loyalty.

“myGatwick is an airport loyalty scheme which is quite different from a traditional loyalty scheme in terms of accumulating points, unlocking rewards over time, and those rewards being a vehicle for the airport to reward lifetime value of customers at various thresholds. This is more about instant rewards. We want our customers who are travelling through Gatwick Airport to log onto the myGatwick portal, which is free to join. It’s free to be part of because that’s our shop window for showcasing. It’s somewhere our retail partners and third-party product providers can place their products to say, we want to reward your loyalty each time you fly.

There’s definitely a good opportunity here. If we can bundle these products in free for flight search, and we can treat the customer like royalty and help to give the best possible experience on the outbound and then the inbound journey, that’s going to really help build both customer loyalty and advocacy. Customers will choose to go through Gatwick Airport.

When a customer has a great experience at Gatwick, next they think about searching for a flight they are likely to visit the airport website to find out where they might travel next, and where the airport can inspire them to travel. For all those reasons, loyalty really is a key part of what we work towards at Gatwick” said Andrew Williamson, Commercial Product Manager at London Gatwick Airport.

Develop loyalty as a competitive advantage

Consider this, when you’ve got a lot of other airports to compete within your region, all offering flights to the same destinations at similar prices, what will help you win passengers and their loyalty?

Creating the best possible passenger experience will make your airport the airport of choice. Providing flexibility and a seamless, intuitive booking experience with Flight Search, personalised travel marketing communications and a unique reward programme will support passenger loyalty and drive non-aeronautical revenue for your airport.

Boost passenger loyalty with Rezcomm

Build passengers’ trust, win loyalty, and become their airport of choice with Rezcomm. Plug our cutting-edge Flight Search Widget and Marketing Modules into your existing tech for a launch within just 2 weeks and benefit from the expertise of our first-class travel marketers. Download our Travel brochure and our Marketing Brochure or book a meeting with our team to discover all the benefits of working with Rezcomm.