Qantas Connected Spaces

Problem & Solution Testing

“How can we improve our business travellers’ experience?”

Australia’s largest airline wanted to know how they could improve their offering to Qantas Club members – specifically those who fly frequently between domestic airports on business.

The Opportunity

The assumption was that, as business travellers, co-working spaces in Qantas Lounges – or elsewhere – would be a worthwhile addition. To test these assumptions, we decided to go straight to the horse’s mouth.

But who were the horses?

First of all, we created Personas based on Qantas Club’s data to work out who our target market were via their roles, their age group and where they were based. It was easy to see why Qantas thought co-working areas would appeal to them – they’re all busy people, working in hotel rooms, airport lounges and on the plane in between meetings. And it was also easy to see that getting these time-poor people to input into this project was going to have to be very direct.

What We’ve Done

‘Guerrilla’ tactics

A concerted email campaign would go straight into their too-hard baskets, so we decided to meet them face to face in the Qantas Lounges and handpicked our targets based on our Persona profiling (guerrilla tactics can be pretty hit and miss without solid background information). We asked each of our Personas their opinions on three potential additions to the Qantas Club offering:

Would a co-working space in the Lounge appeal to them?
How about member-only external co-working spaces?
Would networking opportunities work for them?

What We Discovered

Don’t assume.

While many of them liked the idea of co-working spaces, they were happy with their ability to work in Lounges as they were. And networking opportunities were nice, but not seen as that necessary. In fact, what came, unprompted, out of our research was that they’d prefer better food in Qantas Lounges and better seating arrangements – to keep their exposure to more noisy passengers to a minimum.

The Outcome

We presented our findings to Qantas. While they were surprised to find their assumptions had been so wide off the mark, they understood the adage that “the customer is always right”. So, instead of spending considerable sums on co-working spaces, they have redirected the budget to go towards improving what actually matters to their frequent flyers. Win-win? We think so.