Originally Posted by
OzzyOzBorn
A couple of decades ago, advertising of new scheduled routes was essential. This often involved marketing reps touring local high-street travel agencies / newspaper offices to offer sales deals and familiarisation trips. Not any more. Buying habits have changed completely with the advent of aggregator search websites such as Skyscanner and Kayak facilitating direct online booking by the customer. Even Google has a flights search box. So customers now go to these websites, input departure and destination airport (with the option to include other nearby airports in the search) and up come all the flight options with timings, prices and multiple suppliers listed and bookable. It no longer matters if you've never heard of an airline such as Corendon or Vueling; their services will appear in the search anyway. And it doesn't matter if you're unsure whether a scheduled service operates between [name] and [name]; the search websites will tell you if there is one, and list nearby alternatives if there isn't. Airline executives are well aware of this market shift and put more effort into raising brand awareness than promoting individual city-pairs now. A possible exception would be for promotion of a major new base.
Customers will still visit the websites of the best-known carriers such as Ryanair, EasyJet and Jet2 directly - hence why companies such as these promote the brand so heavily. But increasingly, customers are learning that the aggregator sites will display all options on a route, not just the offerings of one airline.
BTW, I am currently in Manchester. I can't recall seeing any advertising for MAN-NQY by Loganair. But that doesn't matter. Customers find the flights via searching the city-pair on Google or an aggregator site such as those outlined above.
I do agree that increasingly consolidator travel websites show all (most) of the options if you know what you are looking for but 20 years ago I learned a lot about European geography by reading those bold Ryanair ads offering 40-50 destinations "from" a pound each way. Those ads were often on the London Underground and more than once I took myself off to such exotic destinations as Rodez, Haugesund, Trapani, Alghero or Aarhus. Of course it often cost me much more than one pound. My point is that I only knew to look for those destinations because I had been made aware that the routes existed.
So tube posters will not reach everyone - and neither does social media. But targeted social media ads can reach 10s of thousands of likely travellers very cheaply. I am often surprised that airlines don't invest a few hundred pounds to boost route launches - it would honestly do more good than cake and fizzy wine at the gate for the first departure. You only need to be made aware of a route once or twice for it to stick in your mind.
Here in Canada we have had several LCC start-ups in recent months. They all push the same brand message that they are "cheap" but fail to promote their individual routes. I flew back from Palm Springs to YVR in January (peak season) on a new-smelling 737Max with only 12 other passengers. I think that Ryanair does route management rather differently.