AirPortr

The Problem

AirPortr is addressing an interesting problem. The problem of dragging your bags when going on a vacation or a business trip. But more importantly taking the stress away and redefining what flying by plane means. Think of taking the tube in rush hour. Now think of it again and imagine you have four extra bags you need to fit in. Also getting to the airport by train eliminates the posibility of a missed flight. This is what AirPortr's mission is.

Additionally we addressed one more issue which is US security checks. In 2016 alone, 70,000 people missed their flight because of long security checks.

The Goal

Our aim was simple. We wanted to rethink how travel worked and make it better. Take the stress and the bags away from you and ultimately reduce the amount of missed flights. Also we wanted to make it as frictionless as possible and get more people excited about the service... like the one below.

@AirPortr_UK is the best thing since sliced bread! Just said bye-bye at the hotel to 2 pretty heavy bags. I’ll see them next in Boston tonight. Philip was bang on time and walked me through everything. Just a light carry-on to take with me to Heathrow. Love this service! ❤️ - Sandy

We focused on reducing the steps in the booking flow and making it quick and easy to hand off the bags to our drivers using our mobile app. Also, because we held all the data of the passengers as well as the bags including X-Rays, that meant that we could try to work with US Customs to improve the experience of people with connecting flights.

The Approach

I started by analysing how the product worked, understand the needs of the business and objectives as well as going through the zendesk tickets which was really useful as I got a general feel of the complains that users had.

With that in mind I started looking at the current booking journey form as that was the main thing I started working on. I started mapping out which screens we need, which ones we can merge to make the flow easier to use and understand.

The journey had 3 main flows... ABC - Bag check in to British Airways, SDS Outbound - delivery to airport, SDS Inbound - delivery to your London address and two additional... CCD - carousel collection - later abandoned and finally ATA - Airport to airport - which we managed to incorporate to the each flow. After few itterations I ended up with the flow below.

After I had the main flow, I started looking at all the email triggers and how do they map against the booking flow. That helped me create a timeline of events and understand when do we need to communicate something to the customer, when can we reach out for an upsell or a promotion.

We've learned a lot from the tests we ran. We found out that we had to use two APIs to capture all the possible addresses in London. The address step interactions went through at least ten iterations until we got it right. Also we brought back the main questions of the flow back to the home page, which increased the amount of people getting into the booking form. But most importantly we managed to reduce the steps from seven to four. All of that got us basically to the prototypes below.

Another interesting insight was that people just didn't knew their flight number, and even if they did, it took too much effort to find it. More often they knew what time their flight was on though. Which meant we could surface few flights for that date depending on the selected airport, which increased the conversion of the booking form.

Lastly, people felt safer when they recieved messages about the status of their bags. That's why I started working on a My Account area where you could track your orders.

What we've learned

Once we made some changes, we've learned quite a few things. One of the main issues we had in the original flow was the address step where the drop off rate was 47.5% which had a really big impact on the overall conversion as it was really early on in the flow.

Once we had the new address step up and running, the conversion rate slowly started increasing and improved with nearly 3% which had a really good impact on the business.

We also started experimenting with the acceptance app and pulled some of the important messaging at the time of the check-in as quite often these were missed at the time of booking the service.

Thanks @AirPortr_UK for such great service getting my bags to my flight. Already recommended you to everyone I know - Flimininary