- Volaris will target low-income travelers with its marketing actions.
- According to the vice president of the airline, “In Mexico, once you take a flight for the first time in your life, you are part of the middle class.”
- In Latin America there is a historical predominance of long-distance bus travel.
The airline Volaris launched a marketing strategy with which it plans to increase the volume of domestic passengers in Mexico.
The idea is to target with your marketing actions to the low-income commuters who have always been limited to traveling by bus because of cost and convenience.
The strategy is based on the incentive to use the airports that surround CDMX to the maximum.
The campaign will seek to show Mexicans with no flight experience that there are an inexpensive alternative they can use instead of bus fares, as detailed to Reuters Holger BlankensteinExecutive Vice President of Volaris.
Volaris Marketing: Air Travel for Bus Travel
The campaign is explained because in Mexico, as in the rest of Latin America, there is a historical predominance of long-distance bus transport, an industry that increasingly competes with airlines.
According to Reuters, for Volaris it will also be a way of take advantage of the recently opened Felipe Angeles International Airport (AIFA).
It is one of the flagship works of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador that now remains almost empty.
The AIFA came to the flight offer in March 2022 and was built with the idea of relieving the pressure on the Mexico City International Airport (AICM), located in the old center of the city.
For now, the AIFA, built on an existing military air base more than 40 km north of the AICM, it suffers from transportation problems and receives only a few daily flights.
According to the Mexican government, and after the incidents due to the saturation of the AICM, more and more flights will begin to be transferred to the AIFA.
Returning to Volaris’s strategy, Blankenstein said there is “a great potential for captive travelers in the 5 million people who live closer to the AIFA than to the AICM”.
Many of those who live near AIFA have rarely or never flown, and are likely to switch from bus travel to planes, Reuters says after consulting airline executives.
More than 100 million passengers take long-distance buses a year in Mexico, double the air market, according to data from Blankenstein.
And I add: “In Mexico, once you take a flight for the first time in your life, you are part of the middle class.”
According to official data, those who live around CDMX, where the AIFA is located, tend to earn less than residents of the capital city, which has the highest average income in Mexico.
15% of the country’s poorest citizens live in the state of Mexico.
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