This article is part of an ongoing project about social media used within hospitality and travel industries. Purpose of this project is defining social media and looking for examples of companies which implemented social media in their marketing efforts.

Last week Air France KLM, European based airline holding company and one of the largest airline companies worldwide, launched what they claim to be the first social network launched by the airline industry. All usual social elements such as sharing, recommendations and reviews flights, hotels, restaurants and destinations are included. Next to that, customers are able to display flights booked through Air France KLM on their profiles, find other members on the same flight and find members at similar destinations.

Should Air France KLM instead of setting up their own branded social network have collaborated with existing full featured social travel networks such as dopplr and tripit? 

Bluenity is the first community site for travelers in the airline. You can communicate with and meet people who travel with Air France and KLM, at the airport, in the plane or at your destination. Your trip becomes an opportunity to meeting people : for example, you can exchange favourite addresses (hotels, restaurants, shops, events, excursions…), share a taxi on arrival, use your travel time to make new contacts. You can also submit your good travel tips view and comment on tips given by other members of the community. Join Bluenity and make your trip a moment for sharing.

Bleunity, the official title of the social network, is hoping to get a reasonable market share with a potential targetgroup of over 75 million consumers who fly with either one of the two airlines.

Features mentioned in the introduction are all default basic functionalities a social networking site should have. Still, having the advantage of connecting the network to the flight reservation system could give Air France KLM a potential benefit over other travel related social networks.

Patrick Roux, Senior Vice President Marketing at Air France KLM comments on the launch of Bluenity; This is a response to those customers who would like to be proactive on their trip, whether they are traveling for professional or leisure purposes. From 7 November onwards, travellers and especially the 75 million customers who choose our two airlines every year, will be able, by using Bluenity, to meet before, during and after their flight.

As Freshnetworks is also stating, we have our doubts about Air France KLM claiming to be the first airline related social network. Ofcourse it depends how you interpreted a social network, but British Airline for example already soft launched their social network and service Metrotwin. Again, it’s how you interpretet social network and to what extend a service is actually under management of an airline company. Services like dopplr and TripIt have already doing the same for over quite some time.

With such a large potential target group Air France KLM is looking to make a mark for itself in terms of social networking. They might have and advantage of being able to connect profiles with their reservation databases, still we believe other services such as TripIt and Dopplr have major advantages over such a network because of the possibilities to aggregate multiple services and the diversity of users.

Instead, we would have preferred to see a major company such as Air France KLM collaborate with existing social travel services such as the ones mentioned before. Deciding between collaborating with existing services or setting up full new social networks often results in companies going for new social networks. In the end, this will result in consumers being scattered around using several branded networks and eventually get back to the services which enables them to combine all their data of different brands and different other services.

Like many companies, Air France KLM is realizing their own social community hoping to attract customers to engage the online conversation. However, there is no clear distinction between social communities, except for the fact all of these social communities are focusing on a different brand and thus competing to get customers to sign up. As a result, consumers are being sceptic to sign up for ‘another’ service and are more drawn to independant services which are not associated with any form of organization or brand.

Setting up a social network or using social media requires careful planning and a strategic approach. Although companies are eager to launch their own social network, it’s just a matter of time before consumers are no longer registering to every social network available. In the meantime, we could be proven wrong ofcourse and Bluenity turns out to be a great success.

related items

• social media project; how carnival cruises successfully implemented social media
• project about social media in hospitality and travel industry
• LinkedIn and Tripit launch new social travel application
• Eyefortravel travel summit, TUI Travel on social media
• Eyefortravel Podcast; Managing Director of Tripadvisor on future of online travel

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