How researchers used Mobile Ethnographic pre-tasking to understand the in-flight customer experience of airline passengers.

Our client was involved in online qualitative research across a range of industries. They’d recently been approached by a leading airline who were having some difficulties understanding their passengers. More specifically, they felt that their premium travel offering was not satisfying their customers as it should. They had designed their offering to make it the ultimate travel experience combining luxury, on-flight facilities and first-class service.

The Challenge

The airline had gone to great lengths to tailor the ultimate flying experience, but it just wasn’t resonating with passengers. Whilst passengers were not complaining, they were not receiving the kind of positive feedback they felt the experience should be inspiring either.

What our client needed was to go on the journey with these passengers to understand the full experience through their eyes. Although it was possible to piece together the perfect trip for passengers, it was difficult to understand how it worked as a full travel experience.

Unfortunately, understanding the journey from home to the airport and from the airport to their destination was beyond the reach of traditional research methods that our client used.

The Goals

Our clients objectives were to:

Capture real-life, contextual behaviours of passengers throughout their travel journey
Understand the full experience of passengers on the airlines first-class service
Gain authentic feedback from passengers

8 Respondents

7 Tasks

6 Weeks

Tasking Strategy: All-at-once Tasking

The Solution

Based on what our client told us, we were confident that Indeemo would work to help them in their project. Using a pre-tasked, all-at-once task list, our client was able to present passengers with 7 different tasks to complete throughout the course of their journey. Because respondents are able to use the Indeemo app offline, it meant that the issue of respondents not having wifi in-flight or on the go was not an issue.

Furthermore, because all tasks were outlined from the outset, our client was able to gain in the moment, authentic responses from passengers throughout the course of their trip.

The flexibility of the tasking also proved helpful in assessing just how common passengers experiences were. They were able assign the task list to passengers on both the inbound and outbound flight. This meant that they were able to understand how the experience of passengers differed depending on their departure and arrival locations.

Of course, each cities traffic, airport, security procedures and much more a can be totally different. By seeing exactly how passengers experiences were, they would be able to tailor their customer service.

The ability to visualise respondents uploads from this project on the Indeemo Dashboard proved invaluable to our client. Seeing everything from how they travelled to the airport to their in-flight entertainment and food meant that our client was quickly able to see how every journey had similarities and differences. Using this media-rich data, they would be able to make suggestions to the airline about how their offer could be tailored based upon in-context and real-life insights from real-life passengers.

If you’re looking to understand more about how an airline or travel service can use pre-tasking to understand their consumers journeys, please get in touch.

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The use of Indeemo has proven to be effective in enhancing face-to-face sessions across various industries and in both B2C and B2B settings.

The duration of pre-task assignments can vary, with some lasting just a few minutes and others stretching over a week or two.

Our clients frequently report increased productivity in their in-person meetings, thanks to the insights they gather about their participants through Indeemo before they meet face-to-face.