Bluebox Aviation hopes to further its reach into the ancillary sales market of the South Pacific with a new partnership. The company announced it will work with catering and logistics giant dnata to develop and sell solutions powered by the Bluebox WOW streaming IFE solution in the region. The companies will support each other in product customization and processes for delivering joint solutions to customers.
By partnering with Bluebox we’ll be able to help our customers mitigate some of the restrictions required in this new touch-free world. This means allowing airlines to minimize contact and dialogue between passengers and cabin crew but still delivering an excellent service and a full range of food, drinks and retail goods that are such an essential part of the ancillary revenue income for many airlines.
– Duncan Greeney, General Manager Retail, dnata catering
The process of integrating retail and catering logistics into the IFE platform are not trivial. Indeed, the complexity of such efforts generally outweighed the returns in the before times. But with new on-board protocols and passenger expectations the efforts to deliver this new shopping experience that may have been under consideration before are now quickly being finalized and pushed into production. As dnata’s GM Retail Duncan Greeney explains, “[I]n the present climate our customers need solutions that are simple and quick to deploy. By establishing this formal partnership with Bluebox – with its award-winning and rapidly deployable W-IFE systems – we’re positioning ourselves to resolve current constraints and keep our customers’ on-board services running smoothly and safely.”
David Brown, Business Development Director at Bluebox, echoes this idea, noting that the IFE environment “was already evolving to deliver so much more than in-flight entertainment, and COVID-19 expedited our delivery of touch-free payments for on-board retail and the digitisation of materials that support ancillary revenue generation.” This move helps push the IFE platform from entertainment into “an in-flight engagement platform for enhancing the passenger experience on board – still ‘IFE’, but well beyond entertainment,” Brown continues.
Key to getting these products into the air is cooperation between multiple vendors. And for Bluebox this has been a busy summer of developing those partnerships. Thee dnata deal is similar to one announced in June between Bluebox and Retail-in-Motion. That effort also focused on digitalization of the inflight sales trolley, removing payment and product review as touchpoints for the passenger.
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