What is Volotea ?
Volotea is a Spanish airline that was created in 2011 by the founders of Vueling which started operating flights in 2012. Its name comes from the Spanish verb Revolotear which means ‘flitting’ and was chosen to emphasise the concept of the airline’s project which is to connect small and medium-sized cities. What the founders of Volotea Carlos Muños and Lázaro Ros realised before launching this new project was that most flights in Europe leave from capital cities forcing people from other regions to travel all the way to these main airports to be able to fly. Given that a majority of a country’s population does not live in the capital, they thought it would be an interesting opportunity to expand the networks of smaller airports and to allow their neighbouring populations to travel directly to their destination without having to travel through their capital’s airport. This concept has proven to be effective given that Voltoea is growing exponentially.
Objectives
B2B airline platforms have a great potential that most airlines are not exploiting yet. Exploring new possibilities and improvements to produce one of the most efficient platforms on the market could therefore be achievable with reasonable effort. On top of this, analysing the needs and preferences of B2B partners to reach these objectives, would give us more insights into this group of professionals, and allow future research to identify better what they should be focusing on to please them.
In this research project, therefore analysed what B2B platforms are currently made available by low-cost airlines on the European market while investigating what are the needs of the B2B stakeholders in the industry. We then focused on one of these tools which is the Group platform of Volotea in order to identify its strengths, weaknesses, and unexploited opportunities. Based on our findings we suggested some improvements that could positively affect the user experience of the platform.
Research questions
Based on our objectives, the research questions for this project were the following:
- What are the needs of the B2B stakeholders when completing a group booking with a European airline?
- What offline and online digital services do European low-cost airlines offer for their group bookings, and how do they differ from one to another?
- How can we improve the UX of the ‘Volotea Groups’ platform in terms of content, accessibility and usability?