Aer Lingus Content Enhancement

Challenge

What was the requirement identified by Aer Lingus? Aer Lingus is the flag carrier airline of Ireland and the second-largest airline in Ireland. It currently serves more than 91 destinations across Europe, Africa and North America. Aer Lingus is one of our most valued clients and we are proud to have developed a strong relationship which we’ve established over the past 25 years. One of the key requirements that Aer Lingus identified in 2015 was the enhancement of the guest journey, loyalty and customer satisfaction. Based on the 2014 VOG results:

• Voice of guests results indicated static IFE customer satisfaction
• Results suggested there was insufficient choice for passengers
• Frequent flyers were dissatisfied with the limited, repetitive choice due to route specific content
• Inflight Dublin was tasked to come up with an IFE improvement strategy to improve the static customer satisfaction trends

Solution

How did we help Aer Lingus to overturn the situation?

Inflight Dublin carried out a comprehensive benchmarking exercise that compared Aer Lingus’ IFE offering against its key competitors as well as selected “best in class”. The key results showed a broad variety of content being deployed for cross-tier airlines (including more than 1500 movie channels, 100 radio channels, 100’s of CDs & audiobooks, TV shows and games).

Understanding Aer Lingus IFE positioning served as a starting point to determine the necessary next steps. Although Aer Lingus maintained a strong TV selection, our findings showed there was an opportunity to improve the guest experience by providing a more enhanced, differentiated movie offering.

After a detailed analysis and running numerous scenarios, Inflight Dublin proposed two recommendations (taking budget into consideration) that we felt would align Aer Lingus’ offering with that of other 4-Star airlines.

• Option 01:  20 blockbusters each direction, 25 Classic Movies both directions, 5 boxsets and 54 TV Shows
• Option 02:  24 blockbusters each direction, 24 Classic Movies both directions, 6 boxsets and 54 TV Shows

Inflight Dublin felt that there was a number of benefits to Aer Lingus based on our findings and resulting recommendations, including:

• Improved Guest experience through providing an enhanced content offering that will result in greater VOG results;
• A more competitive and differentiated movie selection aligning EI’s service with that of other 4 Star airlines;
• Encourage Guest interaction and feedback through innovative content plans that will help revolutionise Guest experience;
• Synergise marketing and promotional campaigns using our innovative content calendar; and
• Enhance efficiency on a cycle-by-cycle basis through our EI specific content plan.

Outcome

What were the resulting benefits to Aer Lingus?

The results of our strategy were extremely positive;  passengers who thought the offering was excellent / very good increased by over 15% (the highest it has been in three years) and passengers who thought the offering was fair / poor decreased by over 10% (the lowest it’s been in three years). In summary, this initiative resulted in immediate benefits to Aer Lingus and had a very positive impact on its Guests experience KPI’s. We at Inflight Dublin are extremely proud to have helped Aer Lingus develop its inflight entertainment to one that competes strongly with other four, and five star airlines.