Air Premia Boosts Conversion by 20% with Mixpanel Customer Insights

Air Premia is Korea’s first long-haul hybrid service carrier (HSC) established in July 2017 based on the philosophy of providing comfortable air travel for all customers. Air Premia isn’t your traditional airline model– it is creating a new kind of flying experience. Air Premia has charted its own course as a premium airline focused on providing only what customers truly need. As a pioneer of the HSC model, Air Premia aims to bridge the gap between the price competitiveness of low-cost carriers (LCCs) and the comfort and service of full-service carriers (FSCs). The result is an offering that combines reasonable fares, more spacious seating, and efficient, technology-driven service.

At the heart of this transformation is Air Premia Labs, the company’s dedicated IT organization. Rather than relying primarily on people-centered service, Air Premia Labs is building a technology-driven self-service experience that reimagines the air travel journey around digital touchpoints.

From the beginning, Air Premia Labs had a clear mission: “Let’s make Air Premia a data-driven, differentiated airline.”

Achieving that vision required more than improving operational efficiency or being price-competitive. The team needed to understand the entire journey of customers purchasing tickets, identify meaningful user patterns, establish an AARRR framework tailored to Air Premia, and communicate the company’s unique selling points (USPs) effectively. Ultimately, Air Premia needed a way to design and improve the customer experience based on real behavioral data.

As a young airline still establishing its position in the market, Air Premia had to learn about its customers from the ground up. The team needed a clear understanding of who its customers were, how they behaved, and what ultimately motivated them to purchase.

Airline tickets are also a high-involvement purchase. Customers rarely make a decision in a single visit. Instead, they explore options, compare alternatives, build trust, and often return several times before completing a purchase. This made it difficult to understand the full customer journey through fragmented data or a single-device view.

The team needed to answer two critical questions:
Where are customers dropping off—and what are they doing immediately before they convert?

With Mixpanel, Air Premia gained a clearer lens on its customer behavior with the context to make it meaningful.

Previously, it was difficult to connect behaviors across channels and devices. After adopting Mixpanel, the team gained a strong understanding of the customer journey:

• Cross-device visibility: The team could track the behavior of the same user across a multi-device journey.
• Deeper behavioral analysis: Cohort and user-level analyses provided a multidimensional view of customer behavior and its context.
• Comprehensive long-term metrics: Retention, Revenue, and Referral could be analyzed quickly using complete data without sampling.
• From insight to action: Flexible integrations with CDP, CRM, and marketing tools made it easier to move from analysis to practical activation.

These capabilities translated into tangible improvements. 

Here are some of the ways Air Premia has put customer insights into action:

1) Defining Air Premia’s Own AARRR Framework

One of the most significant changes was the ability to build an AARRR framework tailored specifically to Air Premia’s customer journey.

The analysis revealed that the journey was far more nuanced than a conventional acquisition-to-conversion funnel:

• Because of the nature of the brand, customers can take a long time to move from awareness to conversion.
• Content consumption plays an important role in the decision-making process.
• Customers often return across multiple visits before completing payment.
• Conversion tends to happen only after customers take certain specific actions.

Air Premia gained a better understanding that its customers don’t simply move from acquisition to conversion. They explore the offering, develop an understanding of the product, return for further consideration, and then convert.

With Mixpanel, the team can now identify not only where customers drop off, but also which behaviors happen immediately before conversion. This has given Air Premia a much clearer picture of the actions and experiences that move customers closer to purchase.

2) Turning Customer Behavior into Conversion Insights

One of Air Premia’s most important insights through Mixpanel was straightforward: “Clearly communicating our USP has a direct impact on conversion.”

In the early stages, Air Premia was attracting a significant number of visitors, but purchase conversion remained low. Why? Behavioral analysis revealed an important difference between customers who converted and those who didn’t: customers who ultimately purchased tended to spend more time exploring service-introduction and USP-related content.

This reinforced an important finding within the previously identified “explore → understand → revisit → convert” journey: the understand stage plays a critical role in moving customers toward purchase. Armed with this insight, the team strengthened USP exposure throughout the customer journey and strategically positioned content designed to build customer trust.

The result was a more than 20% improvement in direct-sales conversion rate.

3) Improving the Speed and Accuracy of Customer Inquiry Responses

Airline tickets are a significant purchase, and customers frequently have questions about bookings, cancellations, and refunds. Previously, investigating these inquiries often required the team to manually extract data at the log level—a time-consuming process that placed a significant burden on resources.

With Mixpanel, the team can now quickly review a user’s behavioral journey without requiring separate log extraction. This has improved both the speed and accuracy of customer inquiry responses.

More importantly, the process has evolved beyond simply answering customer questions. By examining the user’s behavior leading up to an issue, the team can identify potential root causes and use those insights to drive improvements.

4) Identifying and Fixing Booking-Cancellation UX Issues with Session Replay

Air Premia had received a number of complaints related to booking cancellations. While event data showed that customers were dropping off, it couldn’t explain why.

The team turned to Mixpanel’s Session Replay to investigate the experience from the customer’s perspective. The analysis uncovered a UX issue on a specific page that was causing confusion as customers scrolled through the content. After identifying and improving the problematic section, Air Premia saw a tangible improvement in the user experience.

5) Building a More Data-Driven Organization and Culture

Air Premia continues to use Mixpanel to understand how customers behave throughout their journey. The team’s approach has evolved from looking at individual numbers to understanding the flow behind those numbers—how customers search, evaluate their options, return to the site, and ultimately decide to purchase.

The key is no longer simply knowing what a metric is. It’s understanding how different behaviors and metrics connect across the customer journey. That shift has fundamentally changed the way the team approaches analysis.

Instead of stopping at statements such as, “The conversion rate was X%,” the team now digs deeper:

• Why did customers stop here?
• Why were customers who took this action more likely to purchase?
• What behavior distinguishes one customer segment from another?

This has led the team to:

• Break down behavioral patterns by user segment
• Understand usability through feature-level usage frequency and time spent
• Quickly monitor customer responses to new features at the event level

As the team’s analytical approach has matured, it has moved beyond understanding simply what happened to understanding why it happened.

And that change hasn’t been limited to the analytics team. It is also reshaping how Air Premia makes decisions as an organization.

6) Making Data Part of Everyday Decision-Making

One of the biggest changes has been the expansion of data usage across the organization. Data-driven decision-making is no longer limited to a small number of specialized teams. Strategic teams can now access the data directly, interpret customer behavior, and use those insights to make decisions—and this has increasingly become part of the organization’s standard way of working. Air Premia has become more agile in evaluating and acting on homepage traffic patterns and direct-sales performance data.

Mixpanel’s intuitive interface has also enabled easy adoption for employees who were less familiar with data analysis.

As more team members become comfortable exploring customer behavior on their own, a broader culture of data-driven decision-making is naturally taking shape across the organization.

Looking ahead, Air Premia plans to expand its use of Mixpanel through company-wide training, further refine its event-tracking system, and deepen its understanding of the customer journey. The team is eager to continue gaining meaningful customer behavior insights to enable better experiences and measurable improvements in conversion.