Spirit Airlines has been known to be an a la carte airline where customers would pick and choose their amenities and services when flying. This perception made it seem like Spirit Airlines was nickel and diming their customers when it came to add ons. This posed an opportunity to reinvent themselves where I assisted in rethinking their brand, strategizing new ways to improve the customer experience, and realigned focus on their power users.
To really understand how Spirit Airlines operated, I took part in booking travel from start to finish on a flight. With a team of researchers, we each booked a flight via different channels to understand how users everyday would utilize the services and add ons provided by Spirit Airlines. This helped us gain an understanding of the perception as a budget airline.
For example, the path I chose was booking and checking in on a flight through the Spirit mobile app. While this may seem to be the easiest and fastest way to book travel, the app itself contained many roadblocks and upsells that could turn off a user from completing the transaction.
Often there was a stop gate at every screen trying to upsell a service or add on. This reinforced the perception of why Spirit Airlines was "nickel and diming" customers.
Once the guerrilla style research was complete, next came the definition phase. Here, I mapped out the flow from the different touch-points from pre-flight to post flight, and identified several opportunities to help Spirit Airlines rethink their services.
We also thought about the employee like the flight attendants? As part of service design, I wanted to think through areas where there is human interaction, and this was a prime opportunity to strategize those unique experiences for Spirit as well.
Then I started to concept out various ideas for Spirit to utilize throughout the flight experience. This helped Spirit think beyond just a website but experiences that would help build customer loyalty and bring joy to everyday activities when flying with Spirit Airlines.
For example, when thinking through the idea of budget airlines, we concepted out an idea for the wandering traveler where instead of choosing a location, we would allow them to set a specific budget and offer trips randomly to create a sense of adventure. Another idea was to solve some of the simplest tasks like finding the seat on a plane. When a user checks in, they would get a notification on their phone letting them know if their seat is on the left or right side of the plane to reduce foot traffic stalling. One of my personal favorite ideas I solutioned was creating an employee experience on an ipad where the flight attendant could see when customers needed assistance, if there were special events like birthdays, and communicate through the mobile app.
Overall, this project was a great opportunity to really understand the airline industry. As someone who focuses on bettering experiences across multiple touch-points, I learned a lot on how to think through the needs of the customer and be innovative outside of just using a website. Spirit Airlines was very thankful in helping us push the boundaries on their customer experiences especially how we were thoughtful of each stage of flying. Several of these concepts are currently in development for future release.
