Touch’s mission has always been to bring airlines and passengers a world of global and regional entertainment through humanized customer care. Since the first signs of turbulence, we understood that the only way to respond effectively to COVID-19 disruption was to establish a trusted partnership with the airlines. Touch’s relationship with LOT Polish Airlines is a great example! Let’s review how our flexibility and proactivity were key for LOT to find the best solution to the challenges brought by the pandemic.

The context

We started to work with LOT in 2019 on planning, content strategy, and pricing models with an implementation in January 2020, considering at the time a COVID-free scenario. With the closing of borders and flight cancellations, LOT’s needs changed drastically. As a result, Touch faced a new challenge: work with an adjusted budget, maximizing the content offering while aiming at the best possible quality/quantity balance, and still provide the most efficient solution.

The solution: data-driven decisions

Being flexible was a key factor, bringing a revamped content strategy beyond what was contractually foreseen during the flight cancelation period. We respected and attended to LOT’s needs, genuinely compromising with its success during the present-day and foreseeable future.

“Touch’s provides bespoke customer service through a very close partner-like relationship and a flexible business approach,” said Michał Zawada, LOT’s IFE and Fleet Configuration Manager. He added: “In what is less than one year, Touch has created a high standard IFE microsite for LOT, a Touch Analytics dashboard where we are able to track media consumption and curate the best content for our passengers, supported us in IFEC related projects and helped us acquire content that we previously did not have access to.”

Having the need to have its IFE content optimized, LOT took advantage of our dedicated account management and our Touch Analytics platform to assess the situation better and make decisions that would suit better their passenger needs while still representing substantial investments. Touch Analytics was essential since it allowed us to make decisions in terms of deciding which content needed to be removed, relicensed, or updated. For example:

1. Through Touch Analytics, we discovered that South Korean cinema was trending among LOT’s passengers. These findings led us to keep and invest in this kind of content.

2. The data analysis showed that surprisingly, European cinema - which was part of LOT's regional content - did not perform as well as expected, helping us make a better decision for the client.

This fantastic tool offers us a quantitative view of passenger behavior ranging from recognizing the most-watched movies, passenger retention time on the screen, preferred genre, among others. Combining this information with the engagement and costs data enable us to analyze the financial return that the content is giving the client. The plan is to continue with an ad-hoc decision-making process towards the library, focusing on ROI and the airline need.

According to Michał Zawada, “thanks to Touch’s experience in the IFE market,” LOT Polish Airlines “have been exposed to innovative ideas and opportunities to work with renowned companies in the media industry, such as the most popular Hollywood movie studios. Thus, at the end of the day, on one hand, we have better knowledge of our passengers’ entertainment preferences,  and, on the other hand, we are able to provide them with the content of the highest quality.” The airline also adjusted its “inflight entertainment offering to the completely new situation and optimized operational costs,” Michal explained.

We are proud of this flexible and agile environment created to adjust decisions to COVID-19 current and new challenges. Touch will continue to deliver a content package strategy designed to amaze airline passengers, embrace their needs, and associate a strong positive feeling with the airline brand while enabling flexible budget management for each forecasted scenario.

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