Something special on the Web

American Airlines hopes to take off with $1M Web revamp

By Ellen Messmer
Network World, 6/8/98

[AA logo] Ft. Worth, Texas - American Airlines, Inc. this week unveils a re-tooled Web site that will let the company deliver customized information and messages to the thousands of visitors who buy airline tickets online.

The $1-million revamp will let customers search and buy tickets based on price and provide information on events and services in the cities they want to fly to, according to John Samuel, managing director of interactive marketing.

"Targeting your message is a proven marketing activity," said Samuel. "We've been working nine months on the capabilities we're rolling out. We're introducing a lot of new concepts."

American Airlines today has a somewhat awkward system th at requires visitors to obtain two separate logins--one to use the booking tools, the second for some of the Advantage travel functions, said Samuel. This will be replaced with a single signon--with users to be issued a temporary PIN online,with the permanent one to be mailed to the recipient.

In exchange the airline hopes to gather more demographics about site users, who already generate 23 million page views per week. Some 1.6 million people have signed up for weekly e-mail updates about discount airfare.

American now sells over $140 million in tickets via the Web. Though Web-based ticket-buying is still just 1% of the airline's total $14 billion in sales, American sees electronic commerce as its direct flight to future growth.

For one thing, Web-based electronic commerce offers a way to build brand loyalty among young professionals in particular, said Samuel. "Everything we've done in the past in marketing is based on Platinum and Gold lists of frequent fliers," said Samuel. There has not been much effort to figure out who the frequent fliers of tomorrow are, even though these travellers are the lifeblood of the industry.

"A college grad who becomes a consultant wouldn't show up in our Platinum and Gold travel miles program, but that person is probably going to travel a lot," said Samuel.

Based on the information that Web visitors are willing to divulge to American, the airline next week will begin tailo ring presentation of page views and messages to its customers. If someone likes golf, for instance, the Web site could provide information about golf for people on travel.

The personalization magic will be provided via BroadVision, Inc.'s One-to-One software, a set of CORBA-based application services that link the Web front end to backend databases where information on users and marketing messages is stored.

As middleware, One-to-One is installed on servers that include a profile manager and contact manager, with intelligent agents based on the Iona Technologies, Inc. object-request broker, Orbix, fetching information or combining data.

According to Samuel, the main problem in transforming the American Airlines electronic commerce site has been related to the content-creation side of the task. "This has meant double or triple the work we did before because of the amount of work it takes to create content," said Samuel. American Airlines had to hire a raft of editors, graphic artist s and proofreaders. "We're becoming like a newspaper," he added.

The costs for the upgrade are high, but with the site's successful track record, management is behind the ascent.

And despite the huge amount of work that went into creating the new site, American Airlines staff are ready to turn on a dime if a mid-course correction is needed. "You've got to be agile based on the business feedback," Samuel said.