Copa Airlines Chooses EveryMundo’s BookSMARTâ„¢ to Cope With Increase in Mobile Flight Bookings
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APEX Insight: With mobile having surpassed desktop as the preferred booking option for frequent flyers, airlines are faced with the pressure of offering customers a mobile-friendly booking experience. EveryMundo’s BookSMART„¢ technology offers this service, and Copa Airlines will be the first carrier to deploy it.
It’s a mobile world in two senses of the word: Not only do people take to the skies with nary a second thought, but they do so with smartphones in hand. However, airlines have generally been slow to deliver mobile-friendly user experiences to ticket buyers. EveryMundo is solving that problem. Copa Airlines is rolling out EveryMundo’s BookSMART„¢ toolkit, which converts an airline’s Internet Booking Engine (IBE) into an agile, flexible, mobile-responsive and conversion-optimized infrastructure without the need for additional IT resources. BookSMART„¢ also provides back-end analytics that enable airlines to monitor mobile user interactions in real time, so they may gauge the effectiveness of fares, routes or campaigns, thus increasing bookings and revenue over time.
“Mobile is quickly closing in on desktop bookings amongst infrequent travelers, and has already surpassed desktop as the preferable option in travelers who take three or more trips a year,” said Anton Diego, founder and CEO at EveryMundo. A Phocuswright white paper noted that 45 percent of infrequent travelers – and 65 percent of travelers who fly three or more times per year – book their flights via a mobile device. This accounts for over $50 billion in sales in the US alone.
“Mobile is quickly closing in on desktop bookings amongst infrequent travelers, and has already surpassed desktop as the preferable option in travelers who take three or more trips a year.” €” Anton Diego, EveryMundo
“Our airline needed a fast and reliable way of offering a sophisticated mobile booking experience to our international customers, and we sought a way to provide them with an on-brand mobile experience that would be a seamless extension of what they’ve come to expect from our desktop site,” said Marco Ocando, senior director of Marketing and eBusiness at Copa Airlines, in a press release. “Given our existing relationship with EveryMundo, we were thrilled that the BookSMART„¢ Response mobile infrastructure was available to us and could be implemented without placing significant burdens on the bandwidth of our IT and engineering departments.”
“Our airline needed a fast and reliable way of offering a sophisticated mobile booking experience to our international customers.” €” Marco Ocando, Copa Airlines
Online travel agencies (OTAs) have long had a leg up on the airlines themselves in terms of delivering a smooth and friendly mobile experience. BookSMART„¢, according to Diego, will help airlines reclaim the high ground: “Airlines are seeing exponential growth in mobile traffic. To maximize outcomes in the new mobile booking landscape, airlines need to deliver a fully optimized booking experience to travelers on every channel or device.”
After the Copa Airlines rollout, EveryMundo is doing some heavy lifting for a US-based carrier. Frontier Airlines is rolling out EveryMundo’s airTRFX®, which turns each of an airline’s routes and destinations into a landing page, like what you’d see on Expedia or Kayak. This allows the airline’s marketers to create more targeted campaigns, and learn even more about what their customers want.