Looking to advertise your new website? There aren’t many better billboards than an A380 flying over the largest air show of the year, especially when the goal is marketing a new flight booking engine focused on the A380. Airbus launched its “I Fly A380” site this week, hoping to lure travelers in to more A380 bookings and, by extension, airlines in to buying more A380 aircraft.
The site is a slick interface and a filtered view of ITA search results, focused on A380 flights. In fact, if there are no A380 flights (e.g. JFK-LAX) the system kicks back no results. But where there are A380 flights it has them sorted by trip duration as a default and by price as an option, too. Scroll down to the bottom to see the non-A380 flights for comparison.
In at least one of my comparison searches (the one shown in the example above) there were non-A380 flights cheaper than the least expensive A380 option shown. It will be interesting to see just how often that is the case and whether passengers notice or care.
The site also offers destination information and airline details, allowing for some creativity and inspiration in the search process.
I like the idea being put in play here. I think there is an interesting business case to be made around it. Launching a new metasearch engine is a risky business if you’re depending on the click-through or advertising revenue from it to support the dev and operating costs, but Airbus doesn’t have that problem. This is a straight up marketing play and one of the more useful and interesting ones I’ve seen in some time. Now if only there were a way to also earn some points…
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I have flown in a A380 from Sydney to DFW and the aircraft was great but Qantas just awful. They wanted $25 just to pick my seat on every flight which would have been a $100 which I thought was outrageous. The seat pitch was awful on the 738 and the A380. Then they misplaced my checked bag and the guy turned up at midnight and I had to stay up as he couldn’t find the house. On the way back the flight was very lightly loaded and they wanted us to pay $250 if you wanted a row to yourself. So never again will I fly them. This year it Air New Zealand A320 and 777-200 I have paid for a upgrade to a sky couch seat. It should be interesting to see what that is like.