Mystery Flights To Fill Planes?

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tadjr

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Aug 19, 2002
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I remember a couple years back NW had a "mystery flight" weekend where people bought tickets for a roundtrip flight to ??? (We were discussing this this morning with the wife of a NW employee who works with us.)
Just wondering why marketing (I know, they'd have to work ;) ) cant come up with something like this to offer a break to our Northern friends who want to escape the cold for a weekend? Find some hotels in Florida or Arizona or California that are looking for some fillers and work out an arrangement for some "Mystery Packages to Defrost" and sell some seats. If the seats are empty anyway now offer a great rate so we get some $ coming in and give the people a bargain weekend deal.
Anyone else think something like this could work? If they're only going for a weekend/one night/one day, whatever, they arent probably going to have baggage to lose ;) and with things being so slow right now it would be a great time to win over some customers, would bring good PR now at a time we need it, and bring in some extra $ that we could use without much effort involved.
Anyone from marketing or CCY care to comment? Think outside the box. :up:
 
Because that would be something clever, which management is not capable of being and management only knows how to steal from its employees.

Another thing they need to do is special liveries like WN and HP do, since we are the official airline of the Panthers, how about a silver fuselage with a blue Panther stripe and a the Panthers Logo on the tail?

A green airplane with a silver stripe and the PHL Eagle logo on the tail?
 
Interesting idea, tadjr...

Just one question: what is the problem that this is supposed to solve? I'm serious.
 
Western Pacific did this with a Saturday departure. This was right around the time that e-savers started being done by all airlines.

Whichever part of the country you lived in, they sent you in the opposite direction via COS. From what I understand they managed to fill quite a lot of seats. Many people just need a break to get away from the rat race, even for a weekend.

Of course when was the last time anybody thought out of the box at CCY (not counting the FLL expansion)?
 
mweiss said:
Interesting idea, tadjr...

Just one question: what is the problem that this is supposed to solve? I'm serious.
[post="245245"][/post]​
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It might help solve some of the 100 open seats on the am PIT flight this past week. Some of the 50-80 open seats on the other planes. Right now it is slow travel time in some markets since Spring Break hasnt started yet and ANY additional $$$ would help the bottom line without adding extra expenses. I'm standing there anyway, might as well have some more people to help. Also an event like this would be good for the PR machine. Maybe they could offer something in conjunction with GOFares going systemwide (if it happens soon). To introduce GOFares we want you to GO Defrost for the weekend. This would be a special promotion that would get the GOFares name out there. Even though the special promotion wouldnt necessarily be GOFares, it would be a good tiein.

Whoever finds Seth at their mystery destination gets a free Keg Party with Seth and his buds? :shock:
 
So the goal is to market slow seats, then? Good start of an idea, from that perspective. Coordinating with destinations would potentially be a bigger issue, since that decreases flexibility should the loads rise on a route that would have otherwise served that purpose.

Whatever they do, they should give the new structure a little bit of breathing room to stabilize...but once that's done, I could see this sort of thing as an interesting marketing idea.
 
I dont believe the other carriers involved would have decided where people were going until right before dept. Kind of like Esavers offered for the week. There wouldnt be too much change if they were offered on that short a notice (week before). They could still hold back some seats for regular customers, but on flights where 30-50 or more seats are open a week before, it would be a good bet that you could sell 15-30 and not have problems with overselling and losing your last minute bookings. Also since the customers dont know where they are going until they check in you could change the destination without a problem should the need arise. They could have the hotels signed on as a last minute thing too, kind of like a priceline/hotwire last minute dump of hotel rooms. You could offer it systemwide or start small in PHL or PIT to see what the response would be.
Since we can do the hotel vouchers in the computer now and the tickets would be etickets, everything could be done at the airport at checkin. Customers checked in and given boarding passes with the agent issuing a voucher for the hotel listed in their record done by the group/special sales dept?
 
Any time you are on a thru-flight going thru PHL that will overnight somewhere after PHL, it's always the "mystery" flight. Wantetd to go to PHL, ended up in FLL.....
 
When we (NW) did this it was a huge hit. Every "mystery" destination's local attractions were played up (ie if you wound up in MSP, it was touted as big shopping trip to the Mall of America). It's a great idea, and a suprising number of people across all demographic groups played last time.

Sidebar to Mweiss: At this point, anything fun in aviation should be welcomed with open arms (just my .02).
 
Kev3188 said:
At this point, anything fun in aviation should be welcomed with open arms (just my .02).
[post="245322"][/post]​
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Hey, I'm with you. I was just wondering if he had more behind it than the fun. US needs to keep a short leash on funding, so anything that is done had better get returns quickly. That's all I was thinking there.

I'm glad to hear that NW's program was a success...it leads me to wonder two things. One, how did it do financially? And (possibly answering the first) why did they stop doing it?
 
Good question(s). Not sure how they did money-wise (I seem to remember the tickets were " priced to move," though). Maybe they decided that the despite the publicity-all the local TV networks picked up on it- it wasn't worth it.
 
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