As Northern Europe becomes a critical bridge to Asia and beyond to the Americas, Finnair is following the lead of Icelandic airlines and collaborating with the tourism board to promote stopovers in Finland. The airline has partnered with Travelaer on booking tool which makes selecting hotels and transport for a short-stay simpler.
Rogier Van Enk, Finnair's vice president for distribution, commercial excellence & data science says:
“We have been looking to simplify the booking process for those travelers who desire to book a ticket with a stopover in Finland on our website. Launching this new booking engine is not only welcomed by our customers but also a vital part in supporting the Finnish tourism industry's StopOver Finland initiative."
The booking engine, which works with Travelaer’s Travel PaaS, will allow travelers to book stopover, multi city, and other more complicated itineraries in a user-friendly format on multiple devices.
Travelaer is integrating three key Travel PaaS modules into the new Finnair booking engine:
- A Stopover Module, which lets customers add a hotel and car reservation in path, is fully integrated into the booking process.
- An Instapricer Module acts as an aggregator of various pricing engines (Pros, Amadeus, Google, etc.). It updates the Travelaer engine with flight availabilities, fares, and airport taxes and also supports promo codes, booking fees and any pricing features that amend base fares.
- A Tailored Trip Module which allows Finnair to sell a range of ancillary products, including special seat, meal, pre-paid lounge access, wifi, pre-paid baggage fees and others. Tailored Trip includes a Seat Map feature, which lets travelers select seats.
Travelaer CEO Mike Slone says:
"Today's travelers have unique needs and desires, and like many industries, the travel industry is bogged down by legacy technology systems and apps that don't integrate with other systems, offer a confusing user experience and ultimately fail to meet those needs. Finnair's new booking engine represents a step towards changing that trend."
Anssi Partanen, head of onboarding and the project manager for the booking engine project at Finnair adds:
"Finnair has already started rolling out the booking engine to our English-speaking markets and all markets with language versions will be available during the spring of 2018."
Related reading:
An airline perspective on 2017 and the coming year
Airlines can innovate the stopover experience with mobile