sam s. jain & cheapoair’s smart marketing choices

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Page 1: Sam S. Jain & CheapOair’s Smart Marketing Choices

Sam S. Jain & CheapOair’s Smart Marketing Choices 2017-01-09 by Jason Tannahill Leave a Comment

CEO and Founder of CheapOair – Sam S. Jain

Sam S. Jain, CEO and founder of CheapOair and its various predecessors, has been working in

the travel industry since the 1990s. He started working in a travel agency just a few years after

arriving in New York from India when he was still in his early 20s. Since that time, he’s learned

a lot and tried several approaches – most of them proved successful.

Smartest Choice

At least from our perspective, starting call centers when he moved the business online. At the

time, the other travel sites like Expedia and Travelocity didn’t provide a call-in option; it was all

automated online. When Sam noticed that, he decided to take a different route, making certain

their toll-free phone number was listed on every page of their site.

Creating those first call centers and reinvesting to build more has worked well for a couple of

reasons. The operators are trained to help find the best deals and extras for the customers,

assuring satisfaction with the experience. But beyond that, in many cases there are special deals

that cannot be listed on the website for various reasons. These are offered to those calling in,

giving them a better option at a lower cost, and for CheapOair agents these deals pay a higher

commission.

Other Smart Choices

Page 2: Sam S. Jain & CheapOair’s Smart Marketing Choices

CheapOair partners with various travel-related companies like cruise lines, car rental agencies,

hotels, vacation destinations, etc. Companies from the travel industry that want to advertise with

the company can do so on their various web pages and in their newsletters. For the most part,

they don’t make online hotel bookings, but hotels can advertise on their pages.

For CheapOair, it’s all about using algorithms to find the lowest prices. With at least seven call

centers around the world, CheapOair can offer the possibility of live communication all day

every day. In 2015 they had ticket sales of approximately $4.2 billion through their service. The

call center operators are trained to cross-sell rental cars and hotels, as well as extras such as more

legroom and other upgrades.

When they first established the call centers, leadership noticed they had some problems with

agents fighting and competing in ways that were harmful to the business. The leaders chose to

refocus the energy of the workers to handle the problems internally and focus on daily

performance indicators.

Sam S. Jain’s Impact

Because Jain has come to appreciate his new country and the advantages he’s found here, both

he and the company work closely with several charitable agencies such as UNICEF and Doctors

Without Borders. Sam Jain has consistently ignored the traditional wisdom route to the

company’s advantage. Rather than rush into things and do it like everyone else, he has the knack

of stepping back and finding the ways he’d like to do it differently, then making it profitable.

Since he’s an immigrant to the U.S., he’s mentioned that possibly “the biggest challenge for

immigrant entrepreneurs lie[s] in understanding the American consumer psyche.” He seems to

have handled that challenge just as well as the many others he faced in building a highly

successful company.