Jaunted

What's also different is that once you enter the promotional code on the Gogo payment page, you will be taken immediately to eBay's holiday themed home page so that you can actually complete your holiday shopping while still en-route to your Thanksgiving destination. eBay's promotional partners have also negotiated some additional perks from Delta during the promotional period including inclusion on the delta.com homepage, special email to upcoming travelers, a feature in Delta's blog as well as other social media outlets.

Part of this is straightforward revenue generation: almost the entirety of digital advertising is devoted to getting eyeballs on your site. Having the luxury of being able to route a captive audience through the the eBay frontpage is already a huge win. There's even a degree to which this is a genuine service, since people really do need to purchase holiday gifts and eBay really is a decent place to get them.

There's another motive behind this effort, though, and that's a little further below the surface. eBay is struggling to attract and—more importantly—to hold new users. They're facing relentless competition not just from established retailers like Amazon, which, via its expanding catalog of discounts, is meeting eBay in the middle, but also from search engines like Google and Bing that match customers with products.

The company has a very fundamental but very severe branding problem, where they're perceived as an auction site rather than as the retailer they've become. The first step toward fixing that perception is getting people to realize how the site has changed, not least of all by seeing it themselves.

We're just happy there's a new way to cope with the interminable misery of holiday flights. The old way was really starting to take a toll on our livers. And our kidneys. And our relationship with our doctors, who can be really judgmental sometimes.

Related Stories:
· Delta [Jaunted]
· WiFi [Jaunted]