Agnese Jakovica has almost two decades of experience at airBaltic. Her role as head of digital marketing encompasses international marketing, campaign design, and developing the airline’s performance marketing strategy.
Passengers seek flights that are convenient, affordable, and are either direct routes or with minimal layovers. For airlines in Central and Eastern Europe, meeting these demands is challenging due to geopolitical constraints, and intense competition from low-cost airlines.
This didn't stop our ambition at airBaltic, however, to explore new markets and boost bookings from Western and Southern Europe to the Baltic States. We now connect the Baltics with more than 70 destinations across Europe and the Middle East. To further expand our reach, we needed deeper insights into customer preferences, including their desired travel destinations and how they search flights.
Seeking to expand our reach, we turned to our partner agency, Mediabrands Digital (MBD). Together, we leveraged Travel Analytics Center (TAC), a tool providing insights about where, when, and for how long people are looking to travel.
"We went over the data pieces in all the TAC reports and explored how we can use them in combination with airBaltic's internal data," Jelizaveta Novozilova, Digital Media Specialist at Mediabrands Digital, explained.
Untapped potential: Cities close to the airport
Over six months, together with Mediabrands Digital, we identified several global expansion opportunities and tested them out with more than 100 campaigns and 60000 ad copies.
For example, TAC Brand insights report data showed us a significant number of searches for our brand from Slovakia. This was a big surprise to us because we don’t even fly from there. It turned out that many Slovakians fly from Vienna. The city is just a short drive away from Slovakia and offers direct airBaltic flights to the Baltics.
Moreover, through TAC Destination trends report we identified Google search interest for travelling to the Baltic region from Bremen, which is only a 45-minutes train ride from Hamburg from where airBaltic offers direct flights to the Baltic capitals.
Similarly we also discovered search interest for flights to Baltics from Toulouse, which is not even close to airports we operate. Apparently, people in France are interested in travelling to the Baltic countries, so we could reach them and offer our flights from Nice.
Before using these travel insights, our focus was solely on the destinations airBaltic served, and we didn't consider reaching people in other countries or using keywords with cities near our airports. However, the research showed us the popularity of search queries like “bremen - riga flight”, and “tolouse to riga”.
With these insights, we launched new search campaigns, placing search ads for people looking for flights to the Baltic States from the countries and cities we overlooked before as well as the other way round - flights from Baltics to those cities. Using keywords on Google ads like “flights from Bremen to Riga” or “flights from Riga to Bremen”, we advertised how to reach these cities by travelling to Hamburg first.
By simply expanding our ad coverage and highlighting the proximity of our departure locations, we attracted new customers from outside of the Baltic States and increased bookings.
“By leveraging MBD’s partnership with Google’s International Growth Agency program, we supported airBaltic in identifying new campaign and route opportunities for their expansion using tools, data and insights,” Mediabrands Digital CTO Harlis Velk said.
Planning campaigns around destination trends
We analysed user search behaviour to understand how far in advance people typically search for flights and how long they stay in a destination.
This is especially important when we open new routes between cities that are not our home bases, where we have low brand awareness and limited market knowledge. For example we opened a new winter base in Gran Canaria offering direct flights to the Canary island from Norway and Denmark. So market insights here were of great value to us.
From TAC Lookahead analysis we discovered that people typically start searching for flights from Oslo to Gran Canaria 75 days prior to departure.
This data was crucial for optimising our campaign launch timings. Launching too early would lead to wasted ad spend, while launching too late risked unsold seats.
What surprised us is how much the timing when people search for flights differs between destinations. For Oslo to Riga, the average lookahead window is 40 days, while for Oslo to Gran Canaria, it's 75 days, nearly twice as long.
We also found out that demand typically rises from mid-December through February for Gran Canaria. Insights like these enabled us to optimise marketing investments during high-demand periods to maximise campaign impact and return on investment.
Finally, we leveraged internal data to adjust our investments based on routes’ cabin factor and to improve creative assets based on global weather and temperature data to reach our audience at the right moment with the most relevant ads. For example, we started advertising Baltic cities as an escape from summer heat to clients based in southern countries, like Spain:
Combining our internal data with Mediabrands Digital research enabled us to precisely tailor campaigns, resulting in more relevant messaging and a more effective allocation of our advertising budgets.
By integrating TAC insights into our digital marketing strategy, in the first 7 months of 2025 we saw a 29% YoY increase in bookings, 19% revenue growth and 46% CPA decrease with our Google Ads campaigns in Germany - one of our most important export markets. Additionally, during the same period, we recorded a 30% decrease in CPA in our Norway and Denmark campaigns.
We have ambitious growth plans for our future. We aim to double our fleet within the next five years, adding many new destinations. We will continue to work with our agency partner and Travel Analytics Centre to identify relevant insights for our marketing campaigns and growth plans. That way we can get to know our potential customers even better to further optimise our ads and offerings to align with what they’re searching for.
