While the business of operating an airline has remained more or less the same in the last decade, the business of selling airline tickets and filling up the seats has changed dramatically. In the past, travel agents typically acted as intermediaries between passengers and airlines. Nowadays, many ‘in the flesh’ travel agents have been replaced by browsers, online travel agents and airline websites.
For the purpose of this study, Eyeblaster Research crunched the results of hundreds of millions of airline impressions worldwide. The results suggest that using Rich Media more than doubles the direct response effectiveness of airline campaigns, both in terms of CTR and of Conversion Rate. Homepages, travel, news and finance have the best performance in terms of conversion rate.
For branding campaigns, news, travel, finance, and instant messaging are the best performing environments in terms of Dwell Rate. This is good news for airlines, as news, finance and particularly travel tend to draw more affluent crowds.
