OBB, IDIs: international airline passengers

When we received a brief to help a major international airline conduct market research across four different countries, the FieldworkHub team jumped at the chance. The airline wished to gain insight into the way consumers in Australia, India, the UAE, and the UK use their app to make bookings and manage existing bookings. The research outline aimed to understand the tasks travellers undertake before, during, and after their journey, by capturing details of their activities through an online bulletin board (OBB). We have conducted similar OBB research related to travel, and recruited niche traveller profiles many times before, so were well-equipped to support this study. After completing the OBB tasks, the client then wanted each participant to take part in an online in-depth interview.

To qualify, participants needed to be intending to fly with the end client’s airline in a window of 3-6 weeks from the time they were recruited. We were requested to recruit those taking long-haul and medium-haul flights only, and include a mix of gender. All needed to have booked directly through the airline’s own website or app (as opposed to through an online or bricks-and-mortar travel agent) to ensure that they would be responsible for undertaking pre-flight tasks, such as selecting seats, ordering meals and requesting any additional services. Each participant also needed to be comfortable using their smartphone for managing their flight and curious about using the airline’s app, if not already a user.

This was a highly complex project to schedule. Not only were the FieldworkHub team free-finding participants based on three different continents, but we had to accommodate our participant’s long-haul travel schedules and variable time-zone switches when scheduling the pre and post OBB depth-interviews. The participant profile was also quite niche. To verify each participant, they were asked to upload a photo of their flight ticket or booking confirmation (showing the date of their outbound flight) onto a secure platform. We also needed to recruit passnegers from different tiers of the airline’s loyalty programme. This included a good balance of experience, from jet-setters to infrequent flyers.

The FieldworkHub team also managed the OBB over a 6-week period, encouraging participants to complete the tasks that they were assigned thoroughly and on time. The tasks included requests to upoad photos and videos to illustrate key points, and to answer open-ended questions 3-4 times a week. Managing the OBB was challenging, as some  participants couldn’t commit to the amount of time required to provide high quality insights. We took our client’s request for a high standard of feedback seriously. We monitored poor responses, and any found to be consistently lacking, such as single word responses and those which appeared to be AI-generated, were flagged. Participants who were not completing their tasks to the required standard were removed from the research. After the participant’s flight, their 40-minute depth interviews allowed the research team to explore each traveller’s experience with the airline from start to finish. We received excellent feedback from our client for our perseverance throughout the three months that we worked together.