Sine it’s a slow week with most of our clients still being on holiday vacation, I decided to get some non-priority tasks out of the way. One of these tasks was to look for a new airline to travel for the coming year. USWeb spend roughly $70k per year on travel. I have been using an airline that provided me a Platinum level frequent flyer card, which gets me bumped to First Class often. But, they are not renewing my card because I didn’t fly enough this year. They don’t take into account that I also decide which airline all of USWeb travels.

So I start with the logical step…I enter corporate airline programs into Google. This brings up the website for American Airlines. But there is really nothing on their site that directs you to a telephone number to a sales person in their corporate airlines programs. So I decide to change my approach and start going to the major airline websites. I find very, very little information about corporate travel programs, and no real phone numbers to speak to anyone. After some digging, I finally find phone numbers, but when I call I get stuck in IVR hell. Of course there is no option that says, Corporate Airline Programs.

Obviously no one group accounts for more paid air travel than business. I know for a fact, mostly because I have a friend who worked in the industry, that airlines have corporate sales programs to bring businesses to their airline. But I guess you just have to wait to be found.

If you’re a sales person with a corporate airline program, give us a call. I’m sure you’re missing out on a lot of potential business. A simple search engine marketing campaign would fix this. And if you already use a search marketing firm, fire them. They are not getting you the visibility you need for valuable terms. This is just another example of airlines not really keeping pace with online marketing.

corporate airline travel, search engine marketing, Internet marketing

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 at 10:47 amand is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.