HOUSTON — The honors for the Houston Airport System’s re-imagined website continued when fly2houston.com won two highly competitive categories in the 2017 American Marketing Association Houston Chapter Crystal Awards.

Houston Airport System won the Business-to-Consumer and the Non-profit Website categories. Winners were announced at the Crystal Awards banquet at the Bayou City Event Center on May 11.

Houston Airport System came home with the Crystal thanks to impressive customer engagement. With a laser focus on developing a “mobile-first” passenger-centric website, the Houston Airport System’s re-imagined site produced an increase in mobile traffic from 57 percent to 89 percent and boosted user sessions from 200,000 per month to more than 1.4 million. Desktop users more than doubled, from 88,000 to 194,000, and appreciated the ability to plan ahead by checking live TSA wait times and real-time parking availability, as well as to print the pertinent terminal maps. Monthly in-airport users increased from approximately 4,500 combined at both George Bush Intercontinental Airport and William P. Hobby Airport to 1.2 million, thanks to users’ ability to easily find flights/gates information, dining and shopping options, services available and airport maps. 

The Houston Airport System entries were part of a record-breaking number of entries in 97 separate categories that produced 336 finalists, representing more than 120 Houston companies. Twenty-two judges from a variety of industries including online marketing, PR, higher education, non-profits and agencies reviewed and scored the hundreds of entries. For each entry, two different judges evaluated and scored the work and its supporting write-up, and ultimately sought to answer this question: “Did this work?” The two independent scores were then combined to calculate the final score.

This is the second straight year the Houston Airport System was honored by the Houston AMA chapter. Last year, Houston Airports was named Marketer of the Year in the transportation category, thanks in large part to the unveiling of the new fly2houston.com concept, an approach that helped enhance the passenger’s digital experience with a mobile-responsive website termed by industry experts “the best airport website in the world.”

The project enhanced the Houston Airport System’s brand family by creating a website that was beautiful in design and elegant in function. The effort was lauded by Skytrax, a U.K.-based company that rates airports and airlines, when it awarded both Bush Airport and Hobby Airport websites 5 stars, its highest rating, for both “brand image of airport shown through website” and “visual impact of site layout and colour scheme.” Houston Airport System worked with digital partner Mouth Watering Media to design the site.

The American Marketing Association, one of the largest professional associations for marketers, has more than 38,000 members worldwide in every area of marketing. AMA Houston is the area’s premier professional marketing organization and one of the nation’s largest chapters. AMA Houston provides marketers the ability to remain competitive in today’s business environment through networking events, special interest groups and real-world educational programs.