It’s hard to get away from the word personalisation in travel although it’s mostly applied to its potential for airlines, hotels and other travel providers.
In December 2016, A^3, the Silicon Valley-based innovation arm of Airbus unveiled Transpose to the public.
The project is all about flexibility in cabin design so that airlines can offer passengers a better experience and in return improve the bottomline.
Transpose carried out some modelling with the help of former Virgin America CFO Bob Dana using 1.5 million lines of data from fares to seat configuration and flight schedules.The result was a potential boost to gross margin of between 4% and 7% via increased cabin flexibility and that does not include any price increases.
Lounge area (Photo credit: Airbus)
Co-working area (Photo credit: Airbus)
Restaurant area (Photo credit: Airbus)
The result was that passengers were willing to pay an additional 35% on top of premium economy products for a Transpose flight.
Transpose is talking to Airbus and its partners but it’s a “multi-step process with a lot of stakeholders involved”
One final incentive might be that he estimates that to launch a new aircraft program would cost several billion and take about 10 years while this should cost a lot less and uses existing infrastructure.
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