The global airline industry is undergoing a technological revolution – tapping on online booking, mobile applications, and AI-driven personalization – to provide convenient and accessible services for customers.
Kenya Airways (KQ) is reinventing its platforms to allow enhanced customer engagement and provide prospective travellers greater freedom to manage their own flights.
In a virtual interview with The Kenyan Wall Street, KQ’s Head of Digital Commerce Mwajuma Salim stated that the decision to revamp the airline’s website was informed by a range of issues they had identified. For instance, customers had noted that it was difficult to book flights online due to frequent session time-outs and slower loading time.
“The current generation wants a seamless experience and do things by themselves. They do not want to walk into a travel agency or airline office, they just want to experience travel by themselves and bring everything under their control,” Mwajuma Salim told The Kenyan Wall Street.
Kenya Airways improved their website’s interface to not only minimize these frictions, but also enabled visibility of key information that customers can discover without difficulty. By easing website navigation, even customers who are not tech savvy will be compelled to opt for online flight booking thus hastening the process.
“In addition to that, transparency is key. What the new design highlights is the ease of navigating from one step to another with clearly visible and easy-to-use information such as price histograms, that allow customers to see the different prices that are available in between 3 – 7 days from the date the customer is booking, helping the customer to see other cost-effective dates of travel they can select from,” Mwajuma Salim said.
Self-service check-in offers a customer the opportunity to enter accurate bio-details, choose a preferred seat, notify the airline about excess packages, and save time needed to acquire a boarding pass. For this reason, a customer does not need to arrive at the airport earlier than required to get all these things done.
“Before self-service check-in, you could only get your physical boarding pass printed at the airport. With this specific service, you can self-check in yourself through the mobile application or through the website,” Mwajuma Salim noted.
Whenever flights are cancelled, it can be frustrating for a customer who has to rebook another flight or seek a refund. The revamped website only makes it easy for unfortunate travelers to promptly rebook another flight without having to interact with the KQ call center. Moreover, if a customer is not satisfied with the seats remaining in a flight or the fees charged for a trip, they can opt to rebook by themselves on the website. Customers are guaranteed greater flexibility and comfort.
“We noticed that many of our customers were calling our contact center in the event of a flight disruption. In the spirit of digitizing, we asked ourselves how we can digitize this process similarly to the way we are doing for commercial tickets. Involuntary flight changes are done at a zero cost,” Mwajuma said.
To elevate the value of its flights, KQ also introduced the all-in-one holiday booking platform. On this platform, customers can easily plan vacations early enough by booking flights, destination hotels, and return trips through the airline’s websites. Merging all these travel requirements into a single process allows customers to dedicate more time on other affairs.
“The touchpoint for KQ holidays is that it has a good and user-friendly interface. What this product does is we are empowering the customers to book and manage their holidays without necessarily coming to our offices,” Mwajuma said.
For these efforts, KQ was feted over a week ago for being Africa’s leading airline website in 2024 and Africa’s leading airline mobile application in 2024. The airline was also nominated for the World Travel Tech Awards – indicating the optimism in their path to digital transformation.
Mwajuma Salim believes that the airline will need to embrace proactive measures to identify areas that would iterate customers’ experience. Although receiving feedback via surveys at the end of the checkout can pinpoint areas for improvement, coming up with fresh strategies that will satisfy customers should be the way forward.
“At KQ, we are committed to redefine travel through digital transformation from payments, expansion, continuous optimization of the digital platforms, adopting AI technology to offer personalized experiences,” Mwajuma said.
