LONDON, England – Pegasus Airlines’ Vice President–Marketing Onur Dedekoylu spoke yesterday on 16 September by special invitation at this year’s 12th World Low Cost Airlines Congress held at the London Business Design Centre on 15-16 September. He highlighted Pegasus’ strategy to build on its unrivalled position as one of Europe’s fastest growing low-cost airlines to become a complete travel brand with a strong ‘feel good’ factor to focus not only on the product but also the consumer and experience to respond to its guests’ every travel need. To this end, Pegasus will be launching a brand-new mobile site in October following the launch of the mobile app in 2014.
Speaking on ‘Understanding context and consumer behaviours to enhance your offer’, Onur revealed that “our strategy at Pegasus is to build a strong travel brand providing a one-stop-shop based on three key pillars: providing a complete travel offer, focusing on the feel good factor and overall customer experience and ensuring the offer is price competitive at every stage.” Indeed, Pegasus’ website currently offers a huge range of flight-focused services including seat selection, pre-flight menu booking and price freezing as well as offering a whole range of travel services from A-Z, from car hire, transfers, parking services and car rental via Car Trawler to hotel bookings via booking.com and travel insurance.
Highlighting the airline’s focus on the customer’s travel experience, Onur said “we launched our smart flight packages, a first for Turkey, in 2013 to make the every step of the customer journey more accessible and user-friendly. Then in July 2015, we added a new package, the Basic Package, giving our guests the flexibility to avail of our lowest fares when they fly without checked luggage. This package compliments our existing three Smart Flight Packages: Essentials, Extras and Advantage which offer discounts of up to 50% on our ancillaries. Pegasus is also using technology to innovate and make guests’ experience as comfortable and easy as possible – such as with the upcoming launch of our new mobile site in October. What’s more, all our one-stop-shop travel services, from hotel booking to car rental and visas, will be available across all mobile platforms in the coming year.
Elaborating on the Pegasus ‘feel good factor’, Onur said: “We have been focussing on the ‘feel good’ effect in the past two years to put the customer journey at the heart of what we do. For example we applied this to our on-board travel experience with a focus on families. By creating our Marvel character safety video, selling Marvel Hero character toys on-board and launching our ‘On-board Birthday Celebrations’ with birthday cakes for children, our journey’s have become much more fun and memorable for families. Our interactions with the passenger cover the whole travel experience – so we have been focussing on redesigning our connection channels accordingly”.
Pegasus’ third pillar ensures that the whole offering is price competitive at every stage. Pegasus implements a strategy of continuous cost control and careful management of fixed expenditures, including avoiding significant overheads and administrative costs and continued emphasis on minimising distribution costs.
Pegasus Airlines is one of Europe’s leading low-cost airlines today, flying to 97 destinations in 39 countries. It flew 103.65 million guests between 2005 and the first half of 2015, and its expansion has continued with more routes in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa so far this year.
