Gordian and Kiwi.com took a phased approach to offering seat selection by being flexible and focusing on quick wins first.
Kiwi.com offers flights from more than 800 carriers. They wanted to give customers the option to select seats in a simple and convenient way, providing them with a better customer experience, but this presented a significant challenge. Integrating each provider’s seat selection solution separately would have been prohibitively expensive. Furthermore, providing this functionality in-funnel during the booking flow required various backend modifications that would have taken considerable effort.
Gordian Software’s solution can assign seats regardless of the channel that was used to book the flight. That meant that Kiwi.com could enable that feature for all the providers in one go. As soon as Kiwi.com installed Gordian, it was able to offer seat selection across any flight that they sold. Thanks to the flexibility of our ancillary sales solution, Kiwi.com could sidestep the backend development work needed to integrate the feature in-funnel. In the first instance, Kiwi.com offered seat selection post-booking, through the “Manage My Booking” page on its website. This required significantly less work, and got the feature live and supporting their customers faster.
Currently, Kiwi.com offers seat selection on more than 90 airlines. Based on the post-booking integration success, Kiwi.com has recently integrated Gordian Software’s seat API within the flight booking purchase flow as well.
Gordian Software’s channel-agnostic platform made seat selection affordable in the first place, and our flexible API allowed for a pragmatic, phased implementation that made all the difference for Kiwi.com.