Say goodbye to old ways because Dutch airline KLM is about to offer booking confirmations and boarding passes for travellers via Facebook Messenger by the end of December.
According to Facebook’s Head of Travel Lee McCabe, speaking at the recent World Travel Market in London, the airline will also add a booking service and the ability to buy other items and upgrades.
The airline, renowned for it’s early social Media adoption has already seen massive growth from its social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn, as well as communication apps such as WeChat.
KLM’s Social Media HQ In Amsterdam
McCabe said Facebook Messenger could become the ‘go to customer service hub’ for businesses and their customers to communicate with all interactions in one single place.
KLM recently said that when it activated Messenger it saw a 40% increase in questions from users.
Facebook’s big cheese, Mark Zuckerberg has recently publicly acknowledged the importance of Messenger as being the future of Facebook.
“One of the fastest-growing and most important members of our family is Messenger. We think this service has the potential to connect hundreds of millions of new people, and to become a really important communication tool for the world,”
Mark Zuckerberg
Did you just get a message?
To give you some more crazy stats on that, Mobile phone messaging apps will be used by more than 1.4 billion consumers worldwide in 2015, which is up nearly 32% on the previous year, according to a first ever worldwide forecast for these services. Which is approximately 75% of all smartphone users in the world. That’s a lot of potential travellers out there.
By 2018, it’s forecasted that number will reach 2 billion and represent 80% of smartphone users. Within five years, it could reach total saturation.