Airline Workshop: Digital Transformation strategies, distribution and retailing

Transcript

Hugh Aitken:Good afternoon, everybody. And this panel stands between you and lunch, so we're gonna push it right through to 1 o'clock. So please stay with us. It'll be worth it, I hope. I'm sure it will be. I just want to start off with a couple of contexts and perspectives from Skyscanner before I bring on the panel. So just a few minutes of that. Some of it builds on what Damian actually talked about, but I think that just builds the kind of, this is a theme because as anything, digital transformation, distribution, God, it's a big beast of a topic and how we get our hands around it as an industry and navigate it and think it through and address the challenges we have in industry is a big, big topic. And we'll certainly touch on that in the panel. First of all, I'd like you to help us in this panel. There's a question here. Is travel responding to the consumer tech transformation we have seen during the pandemic? We're either ahead, we're meeting, we're slightly behind, or we're failing to meet consumer needs. And so there's a Slido link here. Either scan the QR code if it's behind me, or just go on to Slido and enter CAPA. And I'd love as many of you as possible to just give us your thoughts. Again, the question is, travel responding to the consumer tech transformation we've seen during the pandemic? 1, 2, 3, 4, just go into that Slido link and give us your views. And what we'll do in the panel is come back to it, and I might come back to you as an audience and get you to participate a bit more. So if you could give us that, that'd be a great start. Thank you. You know, just to give you some context, Skyscanner, we're the 3rd most searched travel brand globally behind Airbnb and Booking.com. This is Google searches on web. We're the 3rd most downloaded flight app globally as well. This is our most recent stats, a couple of months out of date, but we're well over 90% recovered in terms of the visitors coming to Skyscanner. In most of Europe, we're well over where we were in 2019. Asia's very, very— APAC as a whole region, quite variable across the region because of being so vast, is recovering at very fast rates as well. And if we were an airline, we'd be probably about the 4th or 5th largest airline in the world. We put over 200 million travelers and helped our partners with them up in the air. So we're unique. We have about 1,200 partners providing our content to offer to our travelers, and our job is a marketplace in the middle. So we have a unique perspective on what our travelers are thinking and what our partners are saying as well. The first thing our travelers are saying is we all want to be on mobile. Mobile is where over 70% of our total traffic comes from. In parts of North Asia, it's well over 3 quarters, over 80% of our traffic comes on mobile. And you've got mWeb on the right-hand side here, app in the middle, and the left the desktop site. App is quite different. App is a very good channel for us. That's quite a high booking channel because it's quite a closed user group. But people typically come to the web for inspiration, to inspire them, think about where they'd like to go, and then book on desktop. So we have a phrase internally called SoMBOD, search on mobile, book on desktop. And that's important because if you think about it, the vast majority of a traveler's time is spent dreaming. and sharing and being inspired to travel and thinking about where to travel. Only a very small percentage of their time is actually spent booking it. So our job is to really develop that upper funnel to help travelers inspire and provide them that rich content, get that rich content from a lot of our partners as well. Because especially in mobile, McKinsey research recently said, you know, nearly 3 quarters of travelers— sorry, of total retail e-commerce is going to be on mobile by 2025. A lot of those users are new users. They're people who've come to use technology a lot more during the pandemic, and they're going to stick with it. So we've moved very fast during the pandemic to being much more embracing, as we all know, of technology. So what travelers talk about is a consumer-led omnichannel experience. How do we make it seamless? Building on some of the stuff that Geoffrey talked about this morning, that seamless experience wherever you are, meet the traveler where they are. And then on the partner side, you know, there's many, many themes our partners talk about. One is Actually, during the pandemic, you had to very, very quickly adopt technology to help you get through some of the challenges, be that COVID passports more and more, and continuing since, as we start to emerge from the pandemic, using touchless journeys through the airport. So again, using technology through all of that journey, whether it's joined up is something else, but you know, you start to use technology more and more during that journey. If anything, a lot of our partners, it seems to be During the pandemic, NDC wasn't talked about at all. It's actually being talked about much, much more. And if anything, we would observe that it seems to be accelerating. The adoption seems to be accelerating with a lot of airlines who previously weren't getting their head around this mysterious beast called NDC. And we'll certainly touch on that in the panel. And actually, a lot of our airlines are now talking about the real opportunity that affords them apart from just changing their distribution mix and potentially, you know, changing dynamics with the GDSs. Of course, then there's other things like virtual interlining coming in. So during the pandemic, we saw a lot more of our travelers going to virtual interlining and looking and building itineraries themselves. That will change as full-service carriers restore. But again, the technology has accelerated at a pace and the connectivity has. But you're still reliant on 1950s technology. You're still reliant on a single PNR. So you're inhibited and also you're coping with massive growth and struggling with restoring networks. And we heard about some of the manpower challenges as an industry. So So how do you do all of that? But we hear about many, many themes from our partners. This was a list of 12 asked in our office the other day, what are the kind of things that partners are telling us? You know, everything from modern retailing, one order, big data, omnichannel, NFTs, whatever they are. Our partners are talking about huge amount of things that they're having to grapple with and relatively disjointed talking about them all. So how do those all start to come together? So we would certainly argue The use of technology has accelerated during the pandemic. We think it's very much here to stay. So ultimately, how is travel responding? So a reminder of the question, and also this slide will link here, so we'll come on to that as we go through the panel. If I could invite the panel on, that'd be great. First of all, we've got John Chapman from Sabre. He's the Head of Strategic Sales and Business Development in APAC. We've got Matt from Flyr, the VP of Growth, and we've got Nik from AWS, Head of EMEA Travel Industry.

Nikiforos Chatzopoulos:Hi, everyone.

Hugh Aitken:Afternoon, everybody. Afternoon, chaps. I'm just going to, you know, yeah, I put some— setting some scene there of the panel, but I just wanted to get your perspective. You know, each of you come from very different parts of travel. You're involved with airlines and suppliers in very different ways. Some of you are suppliers, all of you are suppliers in different ways. But, you know, what are the observations and trends that you've seen during the pandemic and since the pandemic, and you continue to see coming out of industry? Maybe start with yourself, John.

John Chapman:Yeah, I think obviously technology is moving at a fast pace and all of us in the travel industry have to catch up with other industries and other verticals and really embrace the latest technology that's available. So the digital transformation, I think, is one thing. And then At the IATA level, there's a couple of important initiatives they have, and they were mentioned on your last slide actually, Hugh. Obviously NDC, as you said, is becoming very important, I think, for most carriers. And the concept of one order where we move from the legacy way of doing business into a new world of offer and order management. I think those are the trends I would say.

Hugh Aitken:Yeah, and how do you see that as Sabre? Because, you know, yeah, they're very new concepts. We were chatting earlier on about, you know, when is the end of this single PNR and all of these sort of holy grails we hold up in travel. You know, do you see NDC accelerating and one order becoming a more talked about thing?

John Chapman:Absolutely, both of them. And I think they fit together, they dovetail together, so they're essentially industry standards and objectives that we, all of us here in this room that are a part of the industry can work towards. Is there a clear path of how we get there and how we exit the world of the PNR? Probably not, but certainly that's our vision.

Hugh Aitken:Yeah.

John Chapman:Sabre's investing in building a new offer and order retailing platform that we would see being, you know, really the future. At least in iterative steps between now and say 2030. But I think we'll have a period of time where we have both the existing legacy capability still in place and some newer capabilities as well. And we'll have to, us as a technology provider and a travel distributor and our customers and the other partners in the industry, We'll have to support both legacy and future, and over a period of time we'll transition.

Hugh Aitken:You mentioned IATA. How important is it, the industry coming together? How is the industry coming together? And, you know, how do you see that now versus maybe a couple of years ago?

John Chapman:I think that definitely the uptake of the NDC standards is really building up fast, and I think you said it very well. Probably it was a bit lukewarm prior to the pandemic, but really coming out of the pandemic, we're seeing a lot of airlines really focusing on looking into the future and across the travel industry, actually, not just airlines. So I think there's a big focus now on doing things better, smarter, and more intelligently. And that's now possible with the technology that we have today.

Hugh Aitken:Absolutely.

Nikiforos Chatzopoulos:Yeah.

Hugh Aitken:Thanks, John. Matt, yourself, you know, back to the question, what are you seeing going on in the industry? You know, flyers, You know, relatively new company, you've been in travel, but not doing what you're now focusing on for that long. You know, what are you seeing? What trends and observations are you seeing as you look at the industry?

Matt Brown:Yeah, Hugh, I like your list and I'll probably dovetail off of John, but, you know, the list of the 11 items that you showed there, I think the most interesting part about that is that at the core of creating or answering the question around those terms, sits sort of legacy technology, right?

Nikiforos Chatzopoulos:Yeah.

Matt Brown:So the— we're consistently talking about how to make retailing better, how to do order and offer management better, right? How to take advantage of NDC, how to do dynamic pricing. All of those things are constrained right now by technology and by processes and tools that have been set up for decades, quite frankly. And so until we really address that core, issue, which is where, as we engage with our airline partners globally, where they're centrally focused is, is one, how do I, how do I address those opportunities in a legacy environment today? So how do I make incremental improvements? And then 2, how do I fast forward and leapfrog into the future so that I'm not constrained by this environment that exists, which again is solely technology-based? And that's sort of at the core of our roadmap and planning.

Nikiforos Chatzopoulos:Okay.

Hugh Aitken:Do you think you can do both incremental as well as step change?

Matt Brown:I think you have to. There's not an established airline on the planet that's going to rip out their PSS tomorrow and move immediately to the upper right corner of the IATA matrix. It's just not going to happen, right? Because you've got to continue to service passengers. So from our perspective, you've got to be able to create really a digestible path to get there.

Nikiforos Chatzopoulos:Mm-hmm.

Matt Brown:And it's a path that says it's going to be frictionless, not only for your customers, but it's going to be as least painful to you internally to be able to manage and implement and continue to provide that same level of service. So it's, it's a classic sort of technology maturity model that allows you to start strapping on capability that gets you to that future state over time with minimal disruption and cost.

Hugh Aitken:But how do you unhinge yourself? And this is probably for John. Underlying it all is a 1950s technology. You know, you're adding on to something underneath it all is just creaking at the seams.

Matt Brown:Yeah, and I'm not sure it's necessarily adding on as more— and I'll use the word sort of like supplementing, right? Being able to integrate and interoperable with current systems to a point where you can displace over time. That's really, I mean, that's what digital transformation is, right? We've been using that term for 3 decades now. And it really is about, it's about making future technology work with the existing capabilities over time.

Hugh Aitken:Okay, Nik, back to the question, and please pick up on some of the themes already talked about. You know, what are the observations of change you're seeing as AWS? I guess AWS, you sit across Lots of partners in travel and probably quite a unique perspective.

Nikiforos Chatzopoulos:Absolutely. Listen, I've seen that list that you've shown up before and everything is actually residing on data. And it's a common denominator that we have with our customers, you know, how you can help us. And it's not only about how you can help us with the existing data platforms that we have and that we have set up for them, but what are the new data sources that I can actually patch on? Where can I get those insights that I need To be able to make informed decisions. And it all boils down into what the industry is actually going to right now, which is integrated ecosystems.

John Chapman:Mm-hmm.

Nikiforos Chatzopoulos:So we need to start thinking with the digital transformation as well, but how we can actually integrate those ecosystems together. And definitely cloud is one of the technologies that enables that at this point in time.

Matt Brown:Mm-hmm.

Nikiforos Chatzopoulos:So we mainly asked 2 questions. One is, you know, how is it possible for me to get those? Where can I grab those data? Where do they reside? What kind of data actually I need to take from airlines, from airports, from OTAs, from retailers, from F&Bs? All of these are touchpoints of customers. And when we say customers, we're talking about all 3 profiles. Passengers, which can be high value or infrequent, but also it's the visitors and it's also the employees themselves. They're also customers of ours. They also fly. So that's the first question we have been asked by our customers. The second question we are asked is how we can preempt, predict, preempt, and prevent disruptions and also drive towards operational excellence.

Matt Brown:Right.

Nikiforos Chatzopoulos:and operational efficiency based on those data. What kind of technologies we can use, what kind of services we can use from AWS, some of being machine learning.

Matt Brown:Okay.

Hugh Aitken:Yeah. And I guess a lot of what we've talked about already and the use of data, I guess this panel focuses on distribution. How are you seeing, Sabre, you'll sit across the kind of the leisure and business world and distribution. How do you see a lot of the change that's been happening in technology change, changing the profile of how airlines think about distribution and as an industry we think about distribution?

John Chapman:I think airlines definitely, what we hear frequently is they want to improve their retailing capability. I know Damian in his presentation gave his view of where the travel industry is in terms of retailing. And I think we hear that regularly. They want to retail smarter, better, more intelligently. They want to sell more. They want to— we want to open new revenue sources. So that's really our goal to make that available and scalable and achievable to a larger extent than perhaps not just selling the air ticket and the bags and the meals, but actually perhaps selling third-party ancillaries in a smarter, better way than they've been able to do up till now.

Hugh Aitken:And how'd you do that? when you're dependent on so many other parties in the chain of distribution?

John Chapman:Yeah, so you really need to be as open as possible. So we believe the future is to be open, to be API-led and make your API available and to use common standards so that you can actually take somebody else's API and integrate and really be a bit more modular rather than saying you have to use my box. actually have a platform that is more open and can be connected to other parts of the industry so that you can take data that Amazon might have on their cloud or capabilities that Flyr might be developing, you know, so really to have a wider accessibility and be very modular.

Hugh Aitken:Yeah, I do like the way that Damien rolls. He keeps, he's He goes out and buys a Tesla as easily as he goes and buys a £200 airfare. So yeah, well, you get to Travelport, you get Teslas, it's just like flying down to the Med. I guess the same thing, you know, it always strikes me, Nik, as AWS, that, you know, you sit on probably all of our data. And is there something that you do to bring that together? Is there a role there that somebody like AWS can start to bring a lot of that data together?

Nikiforos Chatzopoulos:Yeah, that's correct. We definitely see a lot of data. The biggest e-commerce platform is Amazon.com right now. Now, we are driven by, as you know, by customer obsession. So every decision we make is actually based on what customers are telling us and how we work with them. And to be able to do that and provide that kind of customer experience that already has been mentioned before by a previous speaker needs to be somehow rationalized, the data has to come together. They need to be merged, they need to be duplicated. They need to be able to generate insights for the next best action that is gonna happen. And those insights and the next best action will drive actually a delightful customer experience, I wanna say. I don't wanna say passenger experience, everyone is a passenger. So a customer experience. And I think this is where Amazon can differentiate. And one of the, You know, one of the solutions we already have, which is Amazon Just Walk Up Technologies, and as well with Amazon One, gives that perfect example of how you combine biometrics, computer vision, and sensors to be able to create that kind of delightful customer experience based on the data that actually you receive. And then you personalize, and then you operationalize as well those data internally for your customers, but also internally for us. So what kind of services, what kind of business services we actually generate that we can expose? And John spoke before about APIs that we can expose, but business services themselves that we can expose to the rest of the organization and also to the consumers so they can pick up and buy new services, new products. Okay.

Hugh Aitken:Makes absolute sense. Matt, I was listening to Geoffrey earlier on and he talked about the seamless experience, but he'll talk about it from an operational sense, you know, what about the backend sense? The real exciting part, isn't it? It's the backend system. But, you know, what's your view? How, you know, is there seamlessness? Is there a move towards that?

Nikiforos Chatzopoulos:Are you seeing?

Hugh Aitken:And, you know, how do we think of that and creating that seamless experience in the backend of airlines?

Matt Brown:There's certainly a desire, right? And underpinning all of this is data, like I think everyone here is talking about. The problem that we see everywhere is that airlines, quite frankly, are swimming in data.

John Chapman:Yeah.

Matt Brown:And so data is very overwhelming and it sits in multiple different silos. There's ponds, there's lakes, there's rivers of data across all sorts of different areas. So at the core of it, it's first making sense of that data and allowing users across the backend, as you say, the commercial function in our world, to be able to operate from the same core set of data and what that data is providing in the form of insights. Because in the end, data is interesting, right? And it's interesting if it's brought together to deliver insights, but it's only important if you could take action that actually makes a positive impact.

Nikiforos Chatzopoulos:Yeah.

Matt Brown:impact in some form.

Hugh Aitken:Yeah.

Matt Brown:So for us, that's, that's been a real key challenge, but it's also been worth every sort of calorie that we spend on it because getting the data centralized, applying learning to that data, serving it up under what we call a single pane of glass that gives really good insight that informs multiple commercial decisions really unlocks a tremendous amount of value that's been trapped in that data Across all those locations.

Hugh Aitken:And it always strikes me, you probably come from it from a different mindset. You know, you'll come from it from a tech mindset, which, and that's not to dismiss any other, but you know what I mean? You look at data in a different way. All of you, you're principally tech companies, and you look at data in a very different way. Yeah, AWS is everything.

Nikiforos Chatzopoulos:No, no, no, I'm just saying I'm coming 20 years from the other side of the fence.

Hugh Aitken:Yeah, but that's a good question. So, you know, how do you see it in aviation? You know, Using data and having that kind of tech experimental and incremental steps and lean learning, all of those sort of things. How do you— what's your experience coming into it?

Nikiforos Chatzopoulos:Yeah, well, you've touched upon like spot on what you just said. We need to have some kind of a unified single view or single pane of glass, as you just said, of those data centralized somewhere in order to break silos. So what I've seen from the airlines so far And I'm coming from an airline background and an airport background as well, is that they think that they have a customer 360 view by deploying customer data platforms, CDPs, or master data management. None of these are actually a unified view of customer data. And so where they need to go and what AWS actually speaking with the customers right now is that they need to do 3 things. First of all, they need to create a true unified customer data platform or customer 360 platform. Then they need to take those insights that have been generated, and I spoke before about those, and create offers and campaigns that will be third-time personalized and operationalized, as I said, in order to drive new revenues, create new revenue streams. And then get the complete, the rest of the ecosystem, the rest of the stakeholders come in and say, I want to patch on those data. I just want to understand as well. Tell me what more can I do with my passengers as well? And what is the single— you spoke about single pane of glass, and we usually say about single source of truth, and there is a single source of truth, but it is a single source of truth for each and every of the stakeholders. It's not for everyone. Single source of truth for operations is different than What is for marketing, what is for sales, and what is for the customer experience leaders. And that is the rationalization that you just spoke before that we need to do.

Hugh Aitken:Absolutely. That makes total sense. Would you mind showing the results of the question that we asked earlier on, if that's okay? I'll wait with bated breath.

Nikiforos Chatzopoulos:Please calm down. It's very stressful.

Hugh Aitken:Okay. Oh well, there you go. Fairly, fairly 58% slightly lagging consumer needs. 6%, there's a very often— yeah, I'm looking forward to talking to the 6% who think we're ahead of consumer needs. So that came out the wrong way. But yeah, so very much seen as we're slightly lagging, but actually not too bad. We're not completely failing, but we're lagging behind. I guess, you know, I've actually asked that question in a couple of events this year. So I'm going to— and Matt, you've done one of these with me before and it was the same one.

Nikiforos Chatzopoulos:Yeah.

Hugh Aitken:I guess no surprises. And why do you think that is?

Matt Brown:Look, I think that there's been a lot of conversation already about how complex the travel retailing order offer fulfillment pieces are. And it's really hard to contrast that with a consumer consuming from Amazon.com. So this isn't surprising to me. I do think, and I've said this before several times, I do think airlines in general and others in the travel space have really done a pretty impressive job. If you sort of take a look back over the last few years and their ability to very, very quickly transform and adapt to a world that had very high consumer expectations.

Nikiforos Chatzopoulos:Yeah.

Matt Brown:So I give a lot of credit to that. But I do think that I would probably fall in that same category there. There's still quite a bit to do. And as other sectors continue to accelerate, there's going to be a lot of continued catch-up, I think, that again, go back to really transforming some of the core systems.

Hugh Aitken:Yeah, absolutely. Nik, any— your view just to build on that?

Nikiforos Chatzopoulos:Yeah, it's quite interesting, but not surprising. We usually speak about customer experience and we always think about get those data to personalize and send and send some kind of campaigns and offers, but we forget sometimes to see what other elements actually affect customer experience, and that is the B2B part of it, the operations part of it. So airlines have done a lot of work moving towards understanding their customers, but they now need to look inside as well, how they can optimize their processes, how they can optimize the procedures using technology so they can be truly digitally transformed. and provide that customer experience. And an example would be a contact center, for example. Contact center, a call center, we've all been in there. I've recently had a very bad experience as well. Long queuing times, being transferred from one agent to the other without any history of what you just said, and most of the times getting that call dropped without any resolution to that. So we need to start thinking about these important touchpoints where the customers are coming in and how we can improve those and get even more data out of those as well. So contact center modernization is one of the solutions we're using in AWS to do exactly that. And we've seen, and it takes a little bit more, and this is what I wanted to take a little bit of your time. You think, okay, another solution there, cloud-based solution. Yeah. Happy, we can deploy thousands of agents in just minutes, and here here we go. You know, we saw the demand. No, it's about how we can actually transform that into a profit center. And what we've seen as a result of this, you know, happy customer experience that that the people who were calling had is that we see cross-selling opportunities. And that was something that was really surprising for us because they were more delighted. And we've seen 2% increase in revenues for airlines that they have deployed this, which was staggering. And, you know, and a significant also IT costs reduction, about 31% and 241% ROI. So it's not only about how improve, you know, the customer experience for the people, but what are the aftermath for that? Cross-selling opportunities, optimization for my own employees, No more frustration for both employees and passengers.

John Chapman:If I could just add, I think behind that, that 58% slightly lagging, I think is we've been as an industry very slow to personalize and to unlock the value of the data these guys were talking about. So I think that's really where we've got to improve. And different surveys have shown that if you actually personalize and you make the right offer to to the right customer at the right time, then you can definitely increase your revenue. So I think that really is the opportunity for us as an industry, and that's really where Sabre as a technology provider is focusing to have that capability and be able to unlock the value of data and deliver personalized offers. That's really our vision for the future.

Hugh Aitken:Okay, so do you think that's where we start personalization? Sorry, is that where we start as an industry catching up? Personalization.

John Chapman:I think we're behind. Obviously, we have a lot of data about our customers. We know who they are, especially with airlines that have frequent flyer programs. They know, you know, what, where you fly and what ticket you buy and what class you travel in. I think actually unlocking that data and personalizing the shopping experience and the buying experience and really targeting the right offer to the right customer, that's That's what we haven't done yet. And that's really the goal. And I think we should then hopefully get a better, you know, if we manage to deliver that as an industry, I think that hopefully that score would change.

Nikiforos Chatzopoulos:Absolutely.

Hugh Aitken:Yeah. And equally, Matt, where do you think we should start?

Matt Brown:Look, I think, as I said earlier, I think all of this starts at the sort of foundational technology This— you used the word back office, which I hate, but I'll continue to use it. Because all of this retailing, offer order, all of this is going to come together when the technology enables it. And until we really fundamentally solve that problem, which is the constraints that legacy systems and processes and tools have fortified in the middle between the traveler and the airline or the offeror, we're gonna be talking about this 5, 6, 7 years from now because that's fundamentally where the problem exists.

Nikiforos Chatzopoulos:If I can add to that, and that's funny enough that you brought it up, 'cause as I said, I'm coming from that environment. I saw that hesitance of moving systems, legacy systems into the cloud, for example. And you explain the benefits that are coming there, But then there is this kind of pushback because there are concerns around, this is a legacy system for me, it's gonna take a lot of effort moving it. What is gonna be the impact? This is a core airline system. If that goes down, my whole airline goes down. And there are solutions to that. So I don't believe it is a matter of only how we digitally transform and technology enablement at this point in time, it's about cultural change.

Matt Brown:Yeah.

Nikiforos Chatzopoulos:And then we need to start educating those people and the airlines and the executives that it's safe, it's scalable, it's cost-saving if you move even your core applications.

Matt Brown:Yeah.

Nikiforos Chatzopoulos:And this is what's happening right now. PSS systems are moving to cloud, core airline systems like AIMMS are moving to cloud. So I think working with the partners as well, like yourselves, together to explain that You know, to the airline community is going to help enormously.

Hugh Aitken:Yeah, it always strikes me that there's a mindset, and quite rightly an airline has a safety mindset, right? It's hard, that's absolutely non-negotiable. But actually, yeah, how do you imbue that experimental mindset? We have a phrase internally at Skyscanner, fail forward, and we celebrate it. That's not something that other places— and you can do that in a Okay, still has an impact, but it's a different sort of mindset.

Matt Brown:Yes. But I would say that the aviation industry as a whole, I mean, we first started flying airplanes 120 years ago. And now we're self-landing rockets back on pads in the middle of the ocean or on the ground. So technology's always been ahead. We've had technology to take 3 pilots down to 2 pilots in the cockpit. to move to glass cockpits, to move to automation that dramatically improves safety for operations. So these things aren't foreign to this sector, which has embraced technology for a very long time. But it's critical that we have the right change leadership to enable the technology to have adoption. But I think it can happen here.

Hugh Aitken:Yeah, and it's a very good point because we often talk about technology being, you know, what you think about as a consumer, your phone and all of that. But actually there's huge Innovation in engine technology and all sorts, which absolutely should be celebrated.

Nikiforos Chatzopoulos:And Hugh, we need to go all together at the same time. So there is a little bit of a divergence. Airlines are going faster into digital transformation. Airports are lagging behind. So we need to somehow get this balanced a little bit so digital transformation is meaningful.

Hugh Aitken:Absolutely. And we've not got long, but is there any questions or observations in the audience? No pressure if there's none. Any thoughts? Anybody want to ask a question from the audience? Hopefully see hands. Okay, so we've only got a few minutes left. Apologies if I didn't see a hand. Please just shout if there is anything. You know, when you look outside the industry, who do you look for? Who do you look at and inspires you? They're doing really interesting stuff outside travel that we would learn a lot from.

John Chapman:I think Amazon.com. Nik's parent company. I think they're definitely seen as being probably doing retailing, digital retailing, probably among the best. So that they set the gold standard and the bar that we would aspire to get to. So that would be my reference.

Matt Brown:Yeah, it's hard to beat Amazon.com, right? It's a household name today. And I think I personally, I also look at Brands that sort of don't wait for consumers to tell them the problem to solve it. And to me, it'll sound cliché, but brands like Apple who are constantly bringing things to consumers that consumers didn't even realize they needed.

Nikiforos Chatzopoulos:Yeah.

Matt Brown:Right? And it becomes sort of a mainstay of their lifestyle.

John Chapman:Setting a new standard.

Matt Brown:Exactly. Those are the kind of aspirational Obviously I cannot say—

Hugh Aitken:You're not allowed to say Amazon.

Nikiforos Chatzopoulos:No, I cannot. I cannot say about Amazon.

Matt Brown:eBay maybe?

Nikiforos Chatzopoulos:But definitely what I'm inspired of is the innovation-driven mindset that, you know, our partners have. And I've seen tremendous innovations happening and they're going faster because they're smaller in scale as companies. So they're going faster into innovations and working, you know, working together with us as cloud providers and them, you know, doing innovations. I think that provides tremendous value to the market. Now within Amazon, a lot of people think Amazon is just a retailer. It's more than that. Obviously, you know, there are devices, there are a lot of other things happening, but what we've seen surprisingly lately is the air cargo space is actually start replicating processes that we, and asking us to help them replicate processes that we have in our own fulfillment center.

Hugh Aitken:Yeah.

Nikiforos Chatzopoulos:So you definitely see a desire of saying, can you please make us a walkthrough to your fulfillment center and see what kind of technologies you use? Robotics, computer vision, and all of these innovations, and then how we can replicate those into the air cargo space in their own warehouses. Yeah.

Hugh Aitken:John, I know you live in— you're Thailand-based.

John Chapman:Yes.

Hugh Aitken:Is there anything you're seeing in APAC? At Skyscanner, we often talk about— we have this mantra internally about Look East. we should look east for inspiration because APAC as a region is so diverse and what's happening in North Asia, down South Asia, you know, it's such a diverse and there's so much to learn and technologies and solutions used in such diverse ways. So, you know, in Europe and over into the US, we should be looking at those brands. Is there stuff that you're seeing in APAC at the moment you think the rest of the world, or equally stuff you've seen elsewhere that APAC could be learning from?

John Chapman:So I think from a technology perspective, APAC definitely is ahead of the curve usually. And I think we saw in many APAC markets, they kind of missed the— they went straight from— straight to mobile and were using mobile computing and perhaps missed the desktop.

Hugh Aitken:Yes.

John Chapman:The desktop step. Whereas markets like the US where Matt's from and Europe, clearly there was very much a desktop space they had to get from. From an industry perspective, when we look at the airline and travel industry, we're probably a little bit, I would say in general, a little bit behind maybe other markets globally. But I believe we can catch up. And I think, you know, in terms of the uptake of digital technology, I think we'll definitely be ahead of the pack there.

Hugh Aitken:Absolutely. Yeah, we're out of time. I'm going to ask one question to each of you just to finish up. If we're sitting in 5 years' time, what will we be talking about? What will we be wrestling with? Really quickfire.

Nikiforos Chatzopoulos:Okay, very quickly. Well, I see that Web3 and metadata are going to be evolving. Emerging technologies are going to be evolving much. Metaverse and NFTs. I know it's a little bit of a vague terminology and a lot of people don't understand it and don't adopt it, but there is also a specific strategy around that, Hugh. I believe that the Web3 evolution to symbiotic web, Web4, as soon as Web3 is actually mature, is going to come in the next 5 years, 5 to 7 years. And if you haven't heard about what a symbiotic web is, it's actually the evolution of Web3 of using metadata with humans and computers and AI to make very specific decisions about the person who's actually searching for. I think this is where we're going to be going to. Great. Thank you.

Matt Brown:Well, that was great. That's hard to follow.

Hugh Aitken:It was, but follow it, please.

Matt Brown:I think it is continuing to use advanced technologies like machine learning to solve more problems, much like what you just said. And then I think it will absolutely be sustainability, which is a theme of this conference for sure.

John Chapman:Absolutely. And I think hopefully Following on to my 2 colleagues here, I think hopefully we as an industry will have advanced much more towards that offer order that we would be using data personalizing. And for example, I came on a full-service carrier and I had a PNR and an e-ticket and an EMD perhaps for my ancillary services. That would be replaced by an offer, which becomes an order.

Nikiforos Chatzopoulos:Yeah.

John Chapman:And I think that's where hopefully we will be in 5 years' time.

Hugh Aitken:Okay, brilliant. Thank you very much. Well, our time's up. You know, yeah, thank you very much for all of your thoughts and observations. You know, we've talked a lot about connecting data and connecting all the bits of the travel, no unified view, and we need to order and offer management starts to bridge that. View data as a profit center. If there's any CFOs out there, there you go. And the whole personalization piece. And maybe in 5 years we can get Nik to come back and explain what Web 4.0 is.

Nikiforos Chatzopoulos:Maybe.

Hugh Aitken:Maybe. Thank you very much, panel. Thank you very much, everybody.

Copyright policy: All transcripts on this site are the copyright of CAPA - Centre for Aviation. Our reproduction policy is as follows: you may quote up to 400 words of any transcript on the condition that you attribute the transcript to CAPA - Centre for Aviation and link to the original video page. All other use is prohibited. While we aim for 100% accuracy in the transcript, there may be some minor transcribing errors.