Case Study: How Transavia Increased Load Factor and Decreased Ad Spend

Transavia is a low-cost airline and part of the Air France KLM Group. It is a market leader in holiday air travel in the Netherlands, flying to over 90 destinations and having a customer base of over 14 million passengers.

Transavia's strategic ambition is to increase brand preference and offer an optimal experience to their existing and potential customers: from inspiration to conversion.

To achieve these goals, the marketing team focused on maximizing marketing efficiency across all channels, by adopting data-driven marketing principles.

The Challenge: MAXIMIZING MARKETING EFFICIENCY ACROSS ALL CHANNELS

The Transavia marketing team's goal was to optimize media spend on display retargeting ads and free up budget for new advertising possibilities. More specifically, they wanted to reduce their current display retargeting costs by at least 15-20%.

With a limited display budget and ambitious revenue targets, they knew it was time to get smarter and more creative about the way they advertise.

Their second challenge was to increase load factor without negatively affecting their margin — a KPI that is under constant pressure in a low-cost market.

That meant finding a way to push underperforming flights harder, while simultaneously easing up on ads for flights that were already doing well. Their main technical challenge was establishing a real-time connection between their legacy revenue system and their marketing channels.

The Solution: Optimizing media spend and maximizing load factor

To tackle the first challenge, Transavia first connected behavioral data from their website with their display networks (DoubleClick and AppNexus). The Relay42 platform then made it possible to segment website visitors into 9 experimental groups and activate each of them with individual retargeting sub-strategies based on different bidding and frequency cap rules.

For their second goal, Transavia’s marketing team began by integrating the Relay42 platform with their legacy revenue management system. This system uses vast quantities of data (historical booking data, current events, weather, etc.) to adjust ticket prices based on what’s going on in the world.

It also plots every flight on a curve to show whether it is over-performing or under-performing. Using the data and the curve, Transavia is now able to set up triggers to show fewer or no display ads for flights that are above the curve, and to use that saved budget to push harder on under-performing flights.