China Eastern Airlines (MU)’s latest innovation – staying one step closer on the consumers' side

Ever wonder why you cannot confirm and guarantee your seat arrangement on a flight at the same time when you purchase a ticket as you do in a cinema, or a train or a concert??Well, while there are many historic reasons and depended a lot on the way air reservations and airline management were first set up, some of these are becoming legacy with the changing technology landscape.

China Eastern Airlines has recently challenged some of these industry conventions and rolled out a new product literally means "Complete in One Step" service.

As we all know, the "traditional" booking process is to select a flight route and time, pay for the ticket, and then choose your preferred seat on the check-in page before the flight takes off – usually within 48 hours of departure, or go to the airport counter to select a seat.

Now China Eastern has turned this process around and made it more user-friendly, it is understood that the service is available for Shanghai Hongqiao to Guangzhou, Wuhan, and Qingdao routes initially, and is only available on the official website of China Eastern Airlines, China Eastern Airlines’ APP, and China Eastern’s WeChat mini program. It is currently in trial period and China Eastern is expected to expand this service to more routes in the future. While it looks on the surface is a small step but we know that it is a complete change in the foundation and logic of the industry and a practice that has been in place for decades, especially a difficult feat for a State-Owned Enterprise.

This new product comes at the right time as more and more airports in China no longer require paper boarding passes and some airports are already experimenting with facial recognition technology at security checks and boarding (ie. Do not even need an ID card for boarding).

This new innovation could also point to more new innovative products and services in the future, like ordering meals, luggage, and other additional services at the time of purchase, rather than at the time of boarding, which means airlines can lock in the demand early and better planning ahead.

As this service is only available via China Easterns' own official channels, it is also possible that the airline intends to use this new product to further compete with the OTAs and recuperate some of the market shares lost in the past, to be more customer-centric and be able to interact with the travelers at more touchpoints.

While at the moment, we do not see much effect on this new service to the corporate travel market, we look forward to China Eastern Airlines continued innovation in the China marketplace, as we have seen with their industry-leading “Fly at Will” (quasi all-you-can-fly) product, which debuted shortly after the onset of the pandemic. This historically important product has high significance for not just the airline industry but also for the wider domestic travel industry like tourism sites and car rental companies and the hundreds of thousands of small-sized operators like restaurants and vendors whose livelihood relies on people traveling for fun.

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