Amancio Ortega, the billionaire owner of fashion chain Inditex (best known for being the owner of fashion retail chain Zara) came to dominate the high street not only through competitive pricing, but also because it found a way to offer what people needed where they needed, with extreme agility.

Zara has managed to make itself essential to a large part of the population. Even if they do not buy everything there, you can be sure that most people will pop into a store, because you may always find something nice at an affordable price...and next month you may find something else.

Which airlines would be able to claim a similar “essential” role for their customers?

How often would you visit your favourite airline’s site to check whether there is something cool you may buy?

It may not even be a plane ticket.

The key word here is relevance.

But what does it mean in practice?

• Extend the touch-points, so that the customer gets to interact with your brand not just once and occasionally but repeatedly through the purchase decision process and even post-sale.
• Reduce the friction points, making interaction with your website or app not just easy, but pleasurable.
• Increase the degree of personalization, so that to keep adding items to the shopping basket becomes almost like a no-brainer.

As an airline you know more about your customers than most retailers can even dream of. There is no excuse not to expand the touchpoints.

Make it easy for the customer to buy from you, and to buy a lot more than plane tickets.

After all, Amazon owes a big share of its’ success to having been able to transition from being a mere online bookstore to a total retailer that efficiently uses the massive amount of data it gets from its’ customers to become ever more useful for them, generating value for them, and for itself and its’ shareholders too, of course!

The airline of the future is, essentially, an interface.

An interface between the customer and a whole range of products and services, with the airline knowing to whom and when to promote them.

This means having the capability to hyper-personalize your offerings, but also to integrate and manage a whole ecosystem of ancillary partners who would find a platform within your airline to reach out to a segmented audience. Think Amazon Marketplace and what it does for many independent sellers, whilst adding to Amazon’s core offering.

Imagine John, who is a salesman for a large corporation.

He is a member of your loyalty programme and you know quite a lot about him: how much he spends, where he travels to, for how long and with whom. You even know about his booking habits and all the travel extras he buys.