Emirates Tears Out In-Flight Entertainment Screens in Favor of Larger Ones
Skift Take
This isn’t about the industry’s largest seat-back screens or more content than you can consume on 100 trips around the world. It’s about personalization. Giving passengers what they value most is the new brand loyalty builder. The key for airlines, which serve global markets, is to understand that what passengers value most differs by region, by demographic, and from individual to individual. Airlines either get that, or passengers will deplane and never come back again.
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Emirates airlines has made some strong brand positioning decisions recently, including the switch to a two-class cabin A380 which eliminates the First cabin and brings the passenger numbers in Economy to a record 615 on flights to Copenhagen.
But there’s a method to the airline’s mad strategy, as proven by its recent decision to stick by and improve its embedded in-flight entertainment (IFE).
This decision is significant as the industry revives the debate over seat-embedded vs. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) IFE.
BYO-Oh
Qatar Airways’ CEO Akbar Al Baker tossed around the idea of tearing the screens out of seats on the airline’s fleet, to save weight on their aircraft and reduce costs, during this year’s IATA World Passenger Symposium in Hamburg.
Al Baker argued that electronic devices change rapidly and that new streaming capabilities of onboard content storage and distribution systems could soon satisfy the needs of passengers onboard, regardless of the number of passengers demanding movies and television shows from the servers. This controversial statement raised some eyebrows during the meeting because i
