Connectivity, sold at booking, activated before takeoff.
Crestline Airways operates 380 daily flights across Asia-Pacific and the Middle East. Premium ancillaries had plateaued. The opportunity: every international passenger lands somewhere they need data, and most pay too much for it. Crestline embedded eSIMs into the booking flow and turned a customer pain point into the fastest-growing line on the ancillary report.
Crestline's premium ancillary mix — seat selection, baggage, lounge — had compounded for six years and stopped growing. Every shelf in the bundle was occupied. The product team needed a new SKU that didn't cannibalize an existing one and that customers actually wanted.
Connectivity was the obvious gap. International travelers consistently ranked 'finding data on arrival' as a top three friction point in post-trip surveys. But the cost of building it was the problem: partnerships with carriers in 60+ destination markets, billing reconciliation, regulatory sign-off in each jurisdiction, and a custom integration into a 1990s-vintage PSS.
A previous attempt with a single regional partner had stalled at 18 months and was abandoned. The legacy PSS could not handle the carrier-by-carrier complexity. The CFO had effectively closed the file.
Next handles the 600+ carrier integrations behind a single API and a single tariff schedule. Crestline's PSS only needed to know one product code: 'global eSIM 7-day' or 'global eSIM 30-day,' priced from Crestline's tariff, billed on Crestline's checkout, fulfilled by Next.
OneSIM's departure-time activation mode handles the lifecycle. The eSIM is provisioned at booking, profile installed before departure, and activates the moment the device pings a foreign network. Crestline's app shows a confirmation banner; the customer never opens a settings menu.
Three sales channels share the same backend: web booking, mobile app upsell, and in-flight entertainment system. The IFE channel was the surprise winner — passengers buying a connectivity plan for the destination during the flight, ready to use the moment they land.
Within six months of launch, eSIM had become Crestline's second-fastest-growing ancillary product after seat selection. The 62% gross margin meant it dropped almost directly to the bottom line.
We launched a new ancillary line that didn't exist on our roadmap a quarter ago. The customers love it. The CFO loves it more.
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