Finnair

How Finnair delivered Nordic happiness at scale

A new value proposition and travel experience that packages Nordic uniqueness and well-being through a curated marketplace of hyper-local Northern activities.

Finnair, Finland's national airline, flies millions of travelers from Asia to Europe every year. But they saw an opportunity to create new revenue streams that extend beyond the sale of airline seats to an end-to-end travel experience.

Services: Customer Experience & Design; Technology & Engineering; Data & Artificial Intelligence; Enterprise Platforms; Innovation & Digital Product Management

The imperative for change

Online travel has become a commodity. Customers have been taught to care only for the lowest price. This initiative aimed to stimulate and test a new type of demand in pilot markets across Asia. Our goal was to attract new customers, people for whom experience takes precedence over a lower price tag.

The transformative solution

As its strategic partner, Publicis Sapient worked with Finnair from concept to fully-realized solution. Through three design sprints, we defined the customer value proposition and prototype, tested it in the target market and designed a functional minimum viable product (MVP). The MVP service was delivered in six months, and was used to get feedback from customers and potential travel partners.

“We really enjoyed the co-operation with Sapient - it was a combination of structure and creativeness, mixing quick progress with much needed flexibility. The overall attitude, reaction, speed, and subject matter expertise of the Sapient team certainly helped our startup-minded team in our efforts to shake and shuffle our industry!”
Kim Gustafsson , Head of Incoming travel services at Finnair

Business impact

In the end, we built a scalable and cloud-native solution, with both B2C and B2B offerings. Co-creating products with local businesses, Finnair focused on year-round experiences to deliver a new business and income model. This new marketplace, named Travel Now/here, combined curated trips into a seamless, end-to-end booking solution, enabling travelers to build memorable experiences from a husky farm to environmental pursuits. Travelnowhere.com not only created an ecosystem around the experience of flying Finnair, it brings the Finnish / Nordics experience to rest of the world.