Case Studies

ITA Airways takes off with AI-driven marketing: up to +58.63% more bookings on short-term flights

4 min read

Published on September 24, 2026

Solutions: Commerce & Enabling Solutions, Sales & Marketing Cost Optimization, Business Intelligence & Data Visualization

Travel, Leisure & Transport

ITA Airways takes off with AI-driven marketing: up to +58.63% more bookings on short-term flights

In partnership with JAKALA and Nexoya, a Swiss tech company specialized in AI-driven marketing analytics, ITA Airways adopted a custom predictive model to optimize media budget allocation across its performance (lower-funnel) digital marketing campaigns. JAKALA supported ITA Airways as a strategic partner for media investment strategy, planning and optimization, guiding the integration of the model into the airline's decision-making processes. The project shows how first-party data, AI and strategic consulting can deliver concrete results even in a complex industry like aviation.

ITA Airways, part of the Lufthansa Group, operates performance (lower-funnel) marketing at scale across roughly 700+ routes and nearly 200 campaigns in 25 countries. Until now, these campaigns had been optimized mainly using bookings and revenue data: valuable indicators, but not always enough for an airline, for which understanding when passengers will actually travel matters just as much as understanding when they book — since it's the passengers who fly, not just those who book, who ultimately generate value.

Closing the gap between the moment of booking and the moment of actual travel is a challenge shared across many industries where booking a service and using it don't automatically coincide: online travel agencies, rail operators, hotels and ticketing platforms all face the same structural issue.

JAKALA supported ITA Airways as a strategic partner for media investment strategy, planning and optimization for performance (lower-funnel) activities, working closely with Nexoya to integrate the predictive model into the airline's Marketing Analytics platform.

To close the gap between bookings and actual travel, Nexoya worked with JAKALA and ITA Airways to build a tailored AI model trained on 2.5 years of flight and sales data. The model analyzes route-level demand patterns, seasonality and booking behavior, predicting future demand across different time horizons: short-term (within 30 days), the primary focus of the optimization, through to seasonal bookings (90+ days).

Based on these predictions, the platform automatically and dynamically reallocates media budgets for lower-funnel activities across channels and routes, informing the algorithms on which routes should receive greater investment based on the real flight targets set by the ITA Airways team. The project's success lies in the strategic use of the airline's first-party data, which made it possible to cross-reference sales flows with actual flown data. The model is also updated multiple times a month with new data, so that predictions stay aligned with evolving traveler behavior and the latest market conditions.

Thanks to this joint effort, flown data has for the first time been automatically and directly integrated into marketing decisions, improving the accuracy of forecasting, planning and budget allocation, and strengthening the link between advertising investment and concrete business outcomes — benefiting not only the marketing team, but also ITA Airways' commercial team.

01

Higher bookings

In the test phase across a portfolio of 20 pilot routes, bookings rose by up to 58.63% on short-term flights, with an average uplift of 8.56% across all flights examined.
02

Unprecedented visibility into demand

For the first time, flight data was automatically integrated into marketing decisions, making forecasting, planning and budget allocation more accurate.
03

Future network-wide expansion

Building on these results, ITA Airways plans to progressively extend the predictive model across its full network of 700+ routes, with the goal of maximizing investment across all of the airline's digital marketing campaigns.