BCD Travel, Senior VP Sales APAC, Ben Wedlock at the CAPA Asia Aviation Summit 2022

Transcript

Ben Wedlock:Yeah, look, the last 2 years have been the hardest, you know, hit to hit our corporate travel industry across the world. And I think, you know, one of the things that we've been seeing around the recovery is we have been starting to get back to travel. People are back on the road enjoying the experience. Obviously, there's a bit of angst and and uncertainty around how they're actually digesting the information and making sure that it's safe to travel. And I think that's the one thing that we've been making sure that we work with our airline partners around, making really that information accessible at point of sale for people to digest, to be confident around getting back on the road, working with our suppliers of making sure that the travelers have that information at their fingertips. There's a plethora of challenges across our industry. I think the transformation both digitally and culturally around how we've been working with inside the industry has changed significantly since COVID You know, we've moved to a very hybrid working model, you know, working digitally and we have to be digitally connected. So I think one of the biggest risks there is how do we control those travelers that are out there being able to work from home and giving them that information at their fingertips to be able to work through and make the correct choices with inside policy? I think that's the hardest thing when you try and control that culture and build culture digitally, I'm sure we've all experienced that over the last 2 and a half years. And that I think is really going to be flourishing in the future, but also a risk around digital nomads of going out there doing things outside policy, I think is the biggest risk to the industry. And I think obviously ingraining sustainability in that is also a big challenge. I'm sure, you know, you probably heard in my session earlier around the challenges of sustainability. It's not just buzzwords and key phrases out there pushing sustainability, but it's about How do we execute that, right? How do we put, you know, build in a framework? How do we build a framework to really go away and work with our partners, both airlines and our customers, around giving sustainability choice to the travelers and wanting to adopt that in their journey as well? There's an open opportunity inside our Asia-Pacific marketplace to really emphasize that sustainability. It is a massive buzzword across our entire industry at the moment. Everybody is trying to be sustainable, but how do we do that in the correct manner? And I think working back with our travelers is that major opportunity because people have to buy in culturally to really drive that sustainability angle. And I think it's not only driven from an individual perspective, but also corporately is massively being able to integrate that culture of how we become sustainable. You know, just giving some examples around, we've kind of worked with our clients around 4 key areas of sustainability of how to become a little bit more sustainable mindset in their travel journey. And first off, it's really evaluating the need to travel, right? Doing that analysis of going, can I do this information or can I do this meeting virtually, right? That is an absolute option. I think the second thing is working collaboratively with our partners. So like the airlines, and I've had countless conversations with our airline partners around how we drive sustainability options for our customers and give that information at the point of sale. I think the other thing is also looking at offsets. Of course, obviously sustainability is very, very vastly around that green initiative and driving driving that, you know, environmental savings. But again, there's some areas of opportunity there throughout that journey as well. Sustainability is a journey across our entire industry. It's not just turn on a light switch and become sustainable. It's about a journey of how progressive that organization is in their transformation around sustainability, how adaptive their policy, how ingrained is their policy and advanced is that around bringing in those sustainable options. I think we're in the infancy stages of the sustainability journey in Asia Pacific. I think Sustainable aviation fuels is a great step into the— towards the right direction, but again, it's a scarce resource across our industry, and I think there's elements of that we can use in that area to really drive that performance from a corporate standpoint. Thank you.

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.