Skyscanner and travel trends analyst ForwardKeys have partnered to enhance the statistics they gather on air travel patterns.
The collaboration will enable two new ForwardKeys flight searches tools to reveal macro traveller trends—‘Travel Willingness’ and ‘Catchment Area’—which Skyscanner captures as part of its Travel Insight platform.
ForwardKeys’ analytics are used by travel marketers, retailers, hotels, destination marketing organizations (DMOs), financial institutions, car rental companies, tour operators, online travel agents (OTAs) and other travel services companies around the world to track and predict traveller arrivals. This allows organizations to anticipate traveler needs, better manage staffing and resources, and evaluate marketing efforts.
The data informing the new ForwardKeys categories is based on Skyscanner’s more than 70 million monthly active users and over 1,200 global partners, combined with ForwardKeys’ own flight booking data.
Hugh Aitken, senior director, strategic partnerships, Skyscanner says:
“Partnering with ForwardKeys presents a great opportunity to support a wider range of businesses with Skyscanner data and the unique insights that this can provide. We look forward to seeing the varied applications of these new techniques and the returns that they deliver in the future.”
ForwardKeys expects to highlight opportunities for a range of travel services providers such as:
• Leakage areas – to highlight where an airport is losing business to a competitor and how they might gain greater market share.
• Marketing and merchandising opportunities – analyzing the geographic make-up of the future footfall to a destination to inform regional marketing strategy investments.
• Return on investment – offering insights into the effectiveness of campaigns by destination marketing organizations, tourism boards and airports.
Laurens van den Oever, chief marketing officer, ForwardKeys says:
“Thanks to our partnership with Skyscanner, we are now able to provide even greater insight into tomorrow’s travellers – firstly by identifying their location and secondly by uncovering their intention to travel, even before they have booked.”