Articles about IdeaWorksCompany

BTN – Business Travel News Europe

Industry reports have revealed that the revenue earned by airlines in ancillary fees has been increasing every year. It was estimated at $65.8 billion in 2021 according to the IdeaWorksCompany and CarTrawler annual airline ancillary revenue report, and that’s still a way off from the $100 billion airlines were expected to reach in ancillary revenue in 2019.  Average ancillary revenue per passenger for 2021 was predicted to be $27.60 and some carriers posted increases of more than 50 per cent in ancillary revenue per passenger for the first half of last year.

Les Echos (France)

Trois exemples qui n’ont rien de cas isolés. En 2021 déjà, le rapport annuel CarTrawler/IdeaWorksCompany, consacré aux recettes annexes du transport aérien, avait identifié quatre compagnies low cost dont plus de 50 % du chiffre d’affaires était désormais constitué par ce qui était autrefois l’accessoire (l’européenne Wizz Air, les américaines Spirit et Allegiant et la mexicaine Viva Aerobus) et neuf au-delà des 30 %. En moyenne, la part des recettes annexes est passée de 12,2 % à 14,4 % du chiffre d’affaires des compagnies aériennes, tous secteurs confondus, selon CarTrawler/IdeaWorks – soit 65,8 milliards de dollars en 2021.

The Atlantic

A recent report by Jay Sorensen, an industry consultant, noted that “the apparent discovery of a new type of upscale leisure traveler” is a welcome surprise for these airlines. It connoted a small miracle: Airlines had once again wrung a new social class from flying, as they had done with first and business class. And they were able to do it, in part, because of a phenomenon called “pain of payment.”

New York Times

Climate pledges are another factor that could permanently reduce corporate travel, according to a report released Tuesday by IdeaWorks, a corporate travel consulting firm. The report said because corporate travel represented a large portion of professional service firms’ carbon footprints, many will not be able to meet their climate goals without a significant reduction in travel.  Jay Sorensen, the president of IdeaWorks, said that some business travel is “very durable,” but that there are “a whole lot” of other trips that were once routine but may no longer be taken. “Airlines are planning for a future in which there are fewer business travelers,” he said.

Skift

“One thing that has strongly survived the pandemic is the airlines’ ability to generate cash from co-brand programs,” said Jay Sorensen, president of Milwaukee-based IdeaWorks, a travel brand consultant. “I think you’re seeing some airlines behave in a way that reflects that area of relative success.”  “(The value of the programs) is based on the ability to sell miles or points to the banks that issue the credit cards.”  The issue, he added, is that selling all or part of a loyalty program provides immediate cash while retaining a loyalty program provides a consistent way of generating revenue as well as a method of interacting with passengers.

Travel Daily News

Last year CarTrawler and IdeaWorksCompany reported the ancillary revenue disclosed by 75 airlines for 2020. These statistics were applied to a larger list of 109 airlines to provide a global projection of ancillary revenue activity by the world’s airlines for 2021. The image below shows how this revenue is distributed within five regions of the world. “The continued growth of ancillary revenue per passenger through 2021 shows the growing importance of this revenue stream to airlines across all markets. The difficult year of 2020 will, in CarTrawler’s view, prove to be a turning point for the way ancillary revenue is perceived by all of us across the travel industry. It is an area with significant growth potential, fueled by differing consumer behavior as we emerge into a post-pandemic world. Travelers’ behaviors have evolved, and as long as ancillary services are providing the reassurances and services that consumers are seeking there is no reason why the expansion of this revenue stream can’t continue,” commented Aileen McCormack, Chief Commercial Officer at CarTrawler.

Wall Street Journal

Businesses periodically try to rein in travel expenses. But as Jay Sorensen, president of consulting firm IdeaWorksCompany, points out, this often gets resolved with loopholes. Over the past decade, many carriers phased out first-class seats, which businesses were increasingly reluctant to pay for, and instead made business class more expensive and lavish, including lie-flat seats and in some cases enclosed personal cabins. Premium economy then took the place of the old business class and bridged the price gap.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic means 2022 will likely be another year of upheaval in the airline business, according to a report issued by IdeaWorks, a Shorewood-based air travel consultancy.  The report was issued in late November by IdeaWorks in conjunction with Dublin, Ireland-based CarTrawler, a global provider of technology solutions for the travel industry. The airline industry must adapt if it expects to resemble what it did prior to COVID, said Jay Sorensen, IdeaWorks president. “During the 20 months of the pandemic, people have developed different spending habits that don’t involve travel,” Sorensen said. “Those spending habits are going to be very sticky. Just because the pandemic eases doesn’t mean that those consumers will leap back into spending money on travel.

Wall Street Journal

Sudden border closures. Quarantines. Given the new risks, the days of improvised trips for business or pleasure have become endangered in the Covid-19 era.  The new Omicron variant did more than prompt governments to quickly close borders and tighten Covid-19-related travel restrictions. It signaled that health disruptions are here to stay as a normal part of travel concerns, right along with storms, strikes and terrorism.  “The casualness of travel is gone. I don’t think it’s coming back,” says Jay Sorensen, president of travel consulting firm IdeaWorksCompany.  He thinks 2019 will be viewed as the high-water mark for jumping on a plane spur-of-the-moment and taking a trip to another continent without care or concern.  Mr. Sorensen issued a report last week to travel-industry clients suggesting that airlines, hotels and others are going to have to bear more risk of disruption if they want people to keep traveling. Change-fee penalties and nonrefundable reservations got temporary waivers during the pandemic, but they have already started creeping back in, making the consumer largely responsible for losses from unexpected disruptions.  Instead, he thinks travel companies are going to have to bear more risk to entice travelers, either by making reservations refundable or by providing insurance that will accommodate health risks and fears at airline expense.

The Street

That may be an optimistic view as a recent analysis of data from business leaders done by the Wall Street Journal suggests that business travel may drop 19% to 36% permanently.  “Brick-and-mortar retail has been devastated by ecommerce and I think this is a parallel story,’’ Jay Sorensen, president of IdeaWorks, an airline-industry consulting firm, told the paper.  Sorensen was a member of the panel consulted by The Journal along with former Spirit Airlines Chief Executive Ben Baldanza, an unidentified current Jetblue (JBLU) – Get JetBlue Airways Corporation Report board member, and the consumer advocate Charlie Leocha, president of passenger-advocacy organization Travelers United.