From Vegas, Baby.

Scandinavian Airlines presents a case study today on how they are using Organic search results captured through the web site to forecast load management issues on the airline and help optimize the revenue management system. 

They track run rates on destination-oriented search phrases and noticed a correlation between spikes in destination search and sold out planes to those destinations a couple of weeks later.  Just to be clear, we’re not talking about on-site search or booking-engine data here but Organic search phrases coming in from search-driven visits.

Of course, the web folks going in to pitch this idea of actually scheduling planes based on search results faced an uphill  battle, just like the folks at Ford did with their production tweak suggestions based on visits to the web site car configurator.

But at some point, the repeated correlation over time (and pain of money left on the table) could not be denied and now destination search volumes are used as an input for the revenue manangement system to improve yield.

Kudos to Massimo Pascotto and team an Scandinavian Airlines for hanging in there, forcing the issue, and winning the metrics battle with the revenue management folks!