At this week’s Phocuswright Europe in Barcelona, delegates discovered how an innovative new technology is being used to help airlines address “troubling” load factors. Philip Yan from Alibaba Group’s Fliggy, explained how many airlines in the Asia-Pacific region are operating some flights on just a 40-50% load factor.  Fliggy, the leading platform that provides comprehensive reservation and fulfilment services for travel suppliers, has an effective solution.

“Load factor is only 40-50% for airlines, and they are troubled by this,” said Yan.  “So we ask them to provide us with list of flights that are due to fly at a low load factor, and we put these in a ‘mystery box’.  We package this up and sell it to travelers, only enabling them to open it two days before travel.  The majority of people then choose to go to this destination because of the low fare price.  We have had great success with this model – particularly China’s Shandong Airlines, which saw a significant increase in load factor on several of its quietest routes.  We’re offering a service that most airlines don’t have the technological capacity to do alone; Mystery Box can be easily connected to their PSS booking systems to offer this service to travelers.”

Fliggy is also helping consumers to make more sustainable travel decisions, via Alibaba’s popular super app, AliPay.  “Travelers can accumulate energy points for sustainable actions,” Yan explained.  “For each sustainable travel decision they make – like walking a certain number of steps, taking public transport from the airport, waiving their in-flight meal or traveling without a check-in bag – they build up a points balance, which can be spent on sustainability initiatives like planting trees.

There are different types of trees you can choose from, for a tree that takes more carbon dioxide, it takes more energy points.  All of these actions are helping airlines reduce their carbon emissions.”