With United’s Ted and now Southwest Airlines competing hard for low-fare travelers, Denver-based Frontier Airlines has called up the big guns.
Donuts.
Beginning in December, Frontier will start replacing some of those plastic-wrapped muffins with nice, fresh Colorado-made Lamar's Donuts. Apple spice-cake donuts, to be exact.
“These things are happy pills,” says my old friend Andrew Hudson, who before running Frontier’s sales, marketing and communications was Denver’s chief spokesman. “Food has never scored high as a differentiator that our consumers are using to make travel decisions, but it's creating a warm and fuzzy in the overall traveler experience that ultimately will help create loyalty.”
The little circles of sugar-fried joy represent Frontier’s strategy of teaming up with distinctive, high-quality Colorado companies to reinforce and extend the airline’s personal appeal. Frontier also has exclusives with Caribou Coffee and Coors, and Andrew says they’ll be announcing another food partner soon.
Food is one of the many customer “touch-points” that Frontier considers critical. The company recently completed an audit of every such connection, evaluating the customer-friendliness of all communications, policies and procedures.
This is why Frontier will continue prospering even as Southwest Airlines finally slams its flag into the Colorado prairie. Like Southwest, Frontier also understands the experience economy -- unlike a lot of so-called aviation industry experts who still scoff at the idea that little things make a big difference to consumers.
One national consultant quoted in the local papers sniffed at Frontier's donut news, saying he was skeptical whether “these kinds of deals actually lead to any benefits.”
Of course, these are many of the same experts that Andrew and I dealt with when we worked together on the opening of what they predicated would be a huge failure called Denver International Airport.
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LINK TO: Frontier Airlines, Lamar's Donuts, Rocky Mountain News story
