The next stage in easyJet’s inflight sales offering is readying for flight. The carrier has partnered with Omnevo to help develop the pre-order and pre-select offerings for its “Eat, Drink, Shop & Duty Free” retail expansion. The first bits are expected to go live later this year.
Omnevo’s ability to work with a variety of clients with different operational needs was a key factor in our decision to partner with them. We believe that their unique approach to digital retailing will help us to meet the needs of our customers and continue to drive our business forward.
– Simon Cox, Director of Inflight Retail at easyJet
Omnevo will help build out easyJet’s web stack with the pre-flight sales offerings. Snack and retail options will be surfaced throughout the booking and pre-travel digital experiences, allowing passengers multiple opportunities to purchase in advance of their flight. That ordering solution will integrate with dnata and Retail in Motion for the payment and fulfillment processes. It will also integrate with the on-board crew app, powered by AirFi, to coordinate delivery during the flight.
June Fisher, Head of Inflight Retail Partner Management at easyJet notes, “Omnevo’s cutting-edge e-commerce technology and expertise in the ancillary space will help us to enhance our customer experience and revenue streams. We are confident that this partnership will bring significant benefits to both our passengers and our business.”
The pre-flight order will follow launch of an order-to-seat solution via the AirFi-powered infotainment portal on board, expected in the next month or two. As Director of Inflight Retail Simon Cox explained to PaxEx.Aero in April, “We think the potential of the system to reach customers is far, far wider than what is happening today. And the killer application in increasing the engagement will be when we enable order-to-seat in the next couple of months.”
Pre-order enables better stock management for the carrier. It dramatically reduces the odds that a sale was missed because a product wasn’t on the cart when the passenger asked (a metric nearly impossible to track without a digital retail system). And it helps reduce carriage of excess inventory. That cost savings could ultimately be the biggest win of the implementation.
But the company has to get it right.
Cox previously suggested “pre-order will launch towards the end of the year” based on internal conversations. “But in an airline size of easyJet,” he continued, “one of the key challenges is when you roll out something like preorder that it’s scalable and we operate across 28 bases and 100 million passengers. So the potential is huge. But the operational complexity is huge as well.”
To make sure they hit that goal, easyJet will continue to deploy one AOC at a time. The Swiss-registry planes go first, as that’s the smallest operation. The Austria-registered fleet should follow, and then UK operations.
Read more:
- easyJet talks up AirFi deployment success, future program plans
- AirFi LEO aims to alter the inflight retail landscape
- Can inflight Wi-Fi ever be profitable?
- Wizz Air gets online – without wifi!
- PaxEx Premium: Basic Connectivity, because passengers really do want it
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Hello can I order some things from the EasyJet inflight book please ? what I wanted was not on board my flight x
I can’t find how to pr order food on the easyJet app
Entirely possible they killed the feature, or that it never really went live. There was a lot of drama around this shortly after the news came out.