Gijs van Popta has been at Air France-KLM (Royal Dutch Airlines) for over 20 years. He has unrivalled knowledge of the company and the wider aviation industry — and is currently responsible for leading teams across digital marketing, online sales, and marketing planning.
Imagine a company that's been soaring through the skies for over a century. That's KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, the oldest operating airline in the world under its original name. Our success hinges on strategically connecting passengers through a hub-and-spoke model. It’s a bit technical but it's how KLM operates. A hub is a central airport that flights are routed through and spokes are the routes that planes take out of the hub airport.
We haven’t survived for over a century by just connecting people and places efficiently though. We’ve done this by optimising our networks, schedules, and for over a decade we have been innovating to reduce our CO2 impact. For instance, in 2011, KLM carried out the world’s first commercial flight partly powered by fuel made from used cooking oil, and Air France-KLM are now the largest buyer of SAF (alternative aviation fuels) in the world. We’re always looking for new opportunities to refine our business model.
That refinement includes a roadmap, which aims to lower our impact on the environment. It’s a tough line to walk in our industry since we are not sustainable and will not be for a long time. But that doesn't stop us from trying to become it, and it has led us to incorporating emission data when prioritising flight routes for our marketing department.
Cleared for takeoff: The A-Team assembles
I’ve always been a fan of the 80s TV show “The A-Team”. Just like Hannibal, I love it when a plan comes together.
A key pillar of any plan is the team you have. At KLM we feel lucky to have passionate digital marketing experts in-house, in our case Jorin van Lindenberg and Stijn Meertens who came up with the idea for this project. They work closely with external Google specialists and engineers to make things happen.
Next, we needed to clearly identify the problem. We have a complex business, operating flights to 160 destinations globally and offering over 22,000 possible flight routes. The problem we were looking to solve was this: How can we focus marketing budgets on routes where KLM has a lower carbon emission offset compared to alternatives, with minimal impact on marketing effectiveness?
The final component to a great plan is the right equipment. The team had noticed a new piece of data on Google Flights that showed the relative CO2 impact of flights. It made us think: Could we integrate this information into our existing business data?
In full flight: The rocket scientist, the data, and the budgets
One of our Google partners, who we jokingly call our rocket scientist because he studied aviation, was able to make the raw data actionable after we received it from the Travel Impact Model (T.I.M.) team.
We were then able to develop an emission scoring model by extracting the passenger-level carbon emission data from T.I.M. for our own flights and benchmarking them against alternative flights on the same routes.
The scoring model is a dynamic one, based on factors such as load, aircraft type, seating configuration, and more.
Essentially, the model assesses our carbon emission output relative to alternatives on each flight route. Each route is then scored from one to ten, but these scores will fluctuate all the time, depending on the most recent T.I.M. data.
We integrated it into our internal model, which manages our advertising bidding at an individual route level. This is powered by Search Ads 360 to help us manage our marketing campaigns across multiple platforms and media channels.
With this information at hand, we can reallocate marketing budgets from routes with higher emissions to those with lower emissions, without compromising the overall efficiency of our marketing budgets.
We hope passengers will make an informed choice about which flight they book — and we nudge that behaviour by focusing on advertising the most carbon-efficient routes.
Navigating the tailwinds: Advertising the carbon-efficient route
We analysed over 22,000 routes globally and used that information in Norway, our pilot country, where all 746 routes were marketed using the new strategy. That meant that we increased marketing spend for lower emission routes by over 90%, while decreasing budget for higher emission routes by over 45%.
After the successful test in Norway we are working on integrating this data into our overall steering globally. Making CO2 impact one of the multiple factors, besides revenue, that we steer upon.
This project helped us optimise more than the traditional marketing goals by including environmental impact. It’s a positive step towards future proof air travel and contributes to the roadmap we have set out.
But this isn't just about KLM. We see this as an opportunity to inspire the entire aviation industry. We are all very aware that we have a long way to go, but by working together, airlines can push the boundaries, one flight at a time.
