An airline's digital transformation journey

To provide a unique passenger experience and increase direct flight bookings

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THEIR STORY

Air Malta is the largest destination airline flying out of Malta, with over 46 years of experience and more than 6 million site visits per year. The airline connects the Maltese Islands with 35 major cities across Europe, the Mediterranean, and Middle East.

By providing a holistic digital solution for the airline, ICON has had the pleasure of supporting Air Malta throughout the past 8 years, from a technical, hosting, marketing, and commercial perspective to help the airline minimise the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on its digital ecosystem and business. Find out more about the airline digital transformation journey below.

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THEIR SUCCESS

ICON has continuously contributed towards the airlines’ growth and has dedicated its entire approach to helping the airline to improve its online presence, grow its digital conversions and ensure the system can support the surge in performance. This is evident in the results we have achieved over the last 8 years, which have generated millions in revenue from paid and organic traffic.

THEIR GOAL

The Airline Industry has become a hyper-competitive market. Carriers require new strategies to differentiate themselves in the digital world and satisfy today’s traveller who expects the best of both worlds—lowest fares and a superior experience.

For this reason, Air Malta realised that it needed to fuel passenger online experience , meet the needs of digital travelers and convert more business online. The airline reached out to ICON to find a digital solution and attend to its two critical business needs:

  • Repositioning Air Malta as a destination airline by strategically targeting key routes across the EU and beyond
  • Aligning Air Malta’s digital experience to its business objectives, while driving value for the customers and increasing direct flight bookings

We are very excited to re-launch our website. The aim of this project was to offer a simplified yet more efficient platform to enhance customer experience and make travel with Air Malta easier and more convenient.

The key driver of this project was customer’s feedback as well as user’s behaviour patterns on the website. Our website is like our flagship store where clients can browse to find our best offers and the widest selection of offers possible.

The new site follows an extensive review of the online purchase process with a view to make it simpler and faster. We aimed to have a clearer navigation menu and personalisation of the user experience by featuring content targeted at specific users.

Former CCO at Air Malta

ICON'S SOLUTION

ICON has been entrusted to deliver a robust digital solution which caters for the end-to-end flight booking experience, from the initial discovery phase, through to the flight booking and check-in process.  Below are some of the key objectives behind this solution:

  • Promote Air Malta’s Target Destinations: The website includes thousands of content-rich pages in several languages, to provide a personalised experience to prospect travellers during their discovery phase. The SEO-driven content varies from tips on the best places to visit in Malta, to holiday ideas across Europe. Supporting the content and SEO activities are targeted advertising campaigns, reaching millions of prospect customers and achieving a return of advertising spend (ROAS) of 1:13 for Air Malta.
  • Increase Direct Flight Bookings: With long booking processes leading to high bounce rates and cart abandonment rates, ICON integrated Air Malta’s website to a leading GDS system (Sabre) and multiple payment providers, to offer a seamless customer journey that would stimulate direct flight bookings.
  • Drive Ancillary Sales: As the aviation industry is shifting from all-inclusive bundled fares to base fares, Air Malta required a flexible solution to sell optional services including excess baggage, hotels, car rental and so on. This was handled through the development of a bespoke e-commerce solution and the integration to third-party ancillary providers.
  • Check-in Made Easy: To allow customers to easily check-in using their preferred method, and thus further enhancing their travel experience, ICON integrated Air Malta’s website with industry-leading solutions – Amadeus & Sabre to facilitate this process.
  • Always Connected: Being able to communicate with customers and keeping them abreast of events which may impact their journey is key for airlines. Air Malta’s digital ecosystem consists of multiple channels from which they can create target notifications, announcements and offers, directly from their back-office system. One key communication platform is the dark website, which is essential to support a crisis event which requires clear, concise information for the Air Malta team, passengers and the press alike.
  • Built-in the Cloud: Using the latest could technology, the website is built for scalability and resilience. Moreover, using a Content Delivery Network, the experience for international users is improved as content is served from data centres close to their proximity. This ensures high availability and performance throughout the customer’s online journey.
  • Highly Secure: Given the sensitive nature of the data that is gathered through the website, key importance was placed to ensure the solution meets the security and GDPR requirements. Website security vulnerability scans are also run periodically, to detect and stay ahead of potential vulnerabilities on the website.
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