For every 100 people who start a flight booking on your site, nearly 88 walk away before completing it. According to SaleCycle, airline booking abandonment averages 87.87%—the highest of any industry tracked.
Abandoned flight bookings are a constant source of frustration for airline marketers. However, they also represent a golden opportunity.
Imagine your airline drives a million booking sessions a month at an average fare of $370. If you manage to convert just 1% more of your abandoned sessions, this translates into roughly $3.25M in additional monthly revenue. A 3% uplift pushes that close to $10M.
In an attempt to convert more of these abandoned bookings, airline marketers usually run heavy retargeting campaigns, following prospects across a wide range of channels.
But there’s a problem.
In many cases, these retargeting efforts fall on deaf ears, targeting passengers who’ve already booked, already flown, or already moved on. Airlines are unintentionally wasting money marketing to passengers who frankly don’t need their services—at least, not right now.
In this article, we’ll explain why this is so common, how to prevent it, and why airlines like KLM and Air France use Supermetrics to recover more abandoned bookings.
Summary
- Flight bookings are abandoned at an average rate of 87.87%, the highest of any industry tracked (SaleCycle).
- For an airline running 1M booking sessions a month at a $370 average fare, recovering 1% more abandoned sessions is worth around $3.25M a month. 3% gets close to $10M.
- Abandoned bookings cost airlines in four places, not one: lost ticket revenue, ad spend wasted on passengers who already booked, ad spend wasted on passengers who already flew, and brand damage from irrelevant retargeting.
- The root cause is stale data. Retargeting runs on overnight batch syncs across disconnected channels, so ads keep chasing people who've already booked or departed.
- Airlines on Supermetrics' real-time activation layer recover more while cutting waste. Air France lifted conversions 26% while KLM reduced cost per booking by 40% and more than doubled bookings at the same media spend.
- The takeaway: this isn't a budget problem, it's an activation problem. Close the data lag and you stop the leak and recover more on the same spend.
Why are airline booking abandonment rates so high?
Generally speaking, airline booking abandonment isn't a funnel problem you can fix with a better checkout flow. It's a function of how people actually shop for flights.
The consideration cycle is unusually long. Travelers research over weeks, not minutes, often waiting on payday, fare drops, or someone else's calendar before they commit. In that window, they're comparing prices across a wide range of options: your site, an online travel agent (OTA) like Booking.com, and metasearch engines like Skyscanner.
To make matters even more complex for marketers, they often switch devices multiple times throughout the process.
Most of that activity is anonymous. A traveler might visit your site five times before they ever log in or enter an email. They might even use incognito mode to specifically avoid being retargeted, or for fear that the price will increase the next time they visit.
This means the sessions where you have the most behavioral signal are the sessions where you know the least about the person generating it.
And the booking itself doesn't always happen on your website. It might happen in your app, through your call center, or on an OTA — each of which breaks the digital trail your retargeting campaigns rely on.
Many marketers struggle to track the customer journey, but airline marketers have it particularly tough. They have to follow long, fragmented, mostly-anonymous journeys that their marketing stacks often simply aren’t built to handle. This is part of a wider marketing data problem.
What does abandoned booking recovery cost airlines?
Abandoned bookings cost airlines in four places, not one: lost revenue, wasted spend on booked passengers, wasted spend on departed passengers, and brand damage.
Cost 1: Lost ticket revenue
High-intent travelers start a booking, disappear, and the unrealized revenue piles up. It’s the cost that marketers tend to focus on because it's the easiest cost to measure. But lost revenue is only the first of four costs.
Cost 2: Ad spend wasted on people who already booked
A traveler abandons their booking on Tuesday morning, then completes it through your call center on Tuesday afternoon. Your retargeting list, refreshed nightly, doesn't know that. By Wednesday morning they're seeing display ads urging them to book the flight they already have.
The same problem applies when someone books via your app or a different device. Without near-instant identity stitching, your ads keep running — and your media budget keeps paying — long after the conversion has happened.
Cost 3: Ad spend wasted on departed passengers
A customer searched for flights to Lisbon for 14 December. The departure date passes. Your retargeting campaign keeps serving them Lisbon flight ads throughout January. This happens because most retargeting setups have no logic to exit an audience based on flight date. Every impression after departure is pure waste.
Cost 4: Brand cost from irrelevant ads
Brand damage is the most invisible cost, and potentially the most damaging. Your highest-value flyers — frequent travelers, loyalty members, business customers — are also the ones most exposed to repetitive, often irrelevant retargeting, simply because they interact with your site most often.
Each irrelevant impression chips away at how they see your brand, and makes them fractionally more receptive to the next competitor offer that lands. Over time, ad fatigue can amount to a genuine loyalty risk.
How do most airlines try to recover abandoned bookings (and why isn’t this enough)?
Most airlines respond to abandonment with a familiar playbook. The traveler leaves the site and gets dropped into a retargeting audience across Google, Meta, and programmatic. They soon start seeing ads for the route they were looking at.
A few hours or days later, if they hand over an email, they get a follow-up message — often with a soft incentive like reminding them their seat selection is waiting.
This approach is easy to set up, easy to report on, and it does recover some bookings. However, it does have some key issues that leave potential conversions on the table.
- Channels run in silos: Display, search, email, push, and SMS each have their own audience list and their own logic. This means you often target the customer on five channels in parallel with the same generic creative, instead of delivering a sequenced journey.
- Audience lists are stale: Retargeting lists refresh on a daily (or slower) batch sync, so the customer who booked through your call center this morning is still in your "abandoned" audience tonight.
- Anonymous and known users are treated as two different people: A traveler who browsed anonymously last week and logged in today is the same customer, but most setups treat them as two separate audiences — and the behavioral signals from each side never inform the other.
- There's no exit logic: Retargeting campaigns rarely have rules for "stop targeting when departure date passes" or "stop targeting after offline conversion," so ads keep running on every passenger who's already flown or booked elsewhere.
- Every customer gets the same priority: A one-time economy booker and a Gold-tier business flyer are worth very different amounts to your airline. However, most retargeting setups have no way to tell them apart — so they bid the same on both.
The result is a system that fails twice. Firstly, it leaks budget as you chase customers who've already booked or already flown. Secondly, it misses the bookings it could be recovering. The signals that would tell you when to re-engage someone, and how, are scattered across systems that don't talk to each other.
Both problems share a root cause: retargeting decisions are being made on stale data, in disconnected channels. Fix that, and you’ll stop the leak while also recovering more of the bookings you're currently losing. This will allow you to redirect the spend you save toward the passengers most likely to convert.
How does Supermetrics help airlines reduce wasted spend and recover more abandoned bookings?
Supermetrics has a real-time activation layer that sits on top of airlines’ existing stacks, connecting your customer data to your marketing channels in real time. This helps you stop the leak and recover more bookings that you’re currently losing. You’ll stop paying to chase passengers who've already booked or departed, and will start reaching the ones still deciding.
Here's how it works in practice.
- Cross-channel orchestration: Use trigger-based logic to sequence messages across channels. Start with one, then escalate to others if there's no response.
- Real-time signals: A lightweight script captures live behavior on your site, which updates retargeting audiences within seconds. You’ll no longer show ads to customers who have already booked (cost 2).
Identity stitching: Reconcile anonymous browsing and known customer profiles into a single view, so behavioral history travels with the passenger. Once you do, you’ll eliminate cost 2. - Smart exit conditions: Automatically remove passengers from retargeting audiences once they've converted, departed, or otherwise stopped being relevant. This fixes cost 3.
- Value-based prioritization: Fix cost 4 by allocating retargeting spend based on customer value signals — LTV, loyalty tier, route value, time to departure — so your budget follows the bookings most worth recovering.
Airlines using this approach are already seeing the impact. For example, Air France used Supermetrics’ identity stitching and cross-channel orchestration to increase conversions by 26%. Meanwhile, KLM combined real-time signals, smart exit conditions, and value-based prioritization to cut wasted media spend and increase conversions by 5%.
Spend less, recover more
Recovering more abandoned bookings doesn’t take a bigger media budget — it takes a smarter activation layer.
With a tool like Supermetrics, you'll identify the right passengers to target, waste less budget on the wrong ones, and deliver orchestrated cross-channel recovery campaigns based on real-time data.
That's what Supermetrics does for airlines like Air France and KLM. Now, it’s time to see what it could do for yours.
Book a demo today.
