CellPoint Mobile Aims To Overcome Lost Airline Revenue Opportunities With A Quick-To-Market Digital Approach

Transcript

Kristian Gjerding:A digital strategy is a strategy that consistently and continuously exceeds passengers' expectations while providing profitable prosperity. I think that's, that's sort of a very simple thing, right? And so if you break it into something more A digital strategy is one that meets passengers where they want to be met and that generates revenue for the airline, right? It's that simple. And I think it cannot be something long-winded, something that is— you can put a lighthouse out maybe 2, 3, 5 years and say this is where we think the world's going to go, but from that point and to next month and the month after and the month after, you've got revenue targets to meet. And you've got to be competitive. And every day you don't do things correctly scalable, you're losing revenue. You're leaving money on the table, which your consumers want it, or your passengers want to pay. And there are many, many examples where there's a broken experience between sort of, I booked my flight, what now? How can the airline cross-sell or upsell me with things that makes more profit? And when they don't do that, when they miss that opportunity, that's where they're leaving money on the table. And I think a digital strategy is one, that mitigates that risk, one that captures the lost revenue opportunity. Making travel easier. I think we just saw today Wizz Air present— Josef from Wizz Air present their strategy, and I think that's a— obviously he's a point-to-point carrier, he's an LCC carrier, he's got a very particular market, and that makes certain things a little easier. And so I think they thought it through from the beginning, that was their sort of business model, and they made sure that their digital strategy was supporting the business model. And they executed it pretty well, I think. So I think that's one carrier where you can look at it. I don't think that necessarily translates one-to-one to an airline like Lufthansa, who was also presenting yesterday. I think that's a bigger operation with more complexity. So I think that there are a lot of good things going on, but there are too many broken links. And we constantly see— I make it a habit and I fly about 220 days a year. I make it a habit to record every time something breaks, and I fly with a bunch of different airlines, not just one. And while we are obviously getting more and more opportunity to deal with them in a sort of digital fashion, the fact is that there's too many times it breaks, too many times it's not really omnichannel, too many times it's— you can clearly see if you are from the inside of the industry where the legacy is constraining their ability to execute. And I think that airlines need to disentangle themselves from sort of the traditional vendor picture and making sure that they piecemeal the things into a coherent solution that services their business needs, which essentially obviously is apart from their core product— that's not my specialty— is to service their clients in the right way. If people saw the panel earlier today, one of the things that came up was what are the challenges from an organizational and cultural perspective, and I think what we offer is really a way for these merchants, the travel merchants, the airlines, to service the direct channel very effectively, very fast. It's all about time to market. It's mobile first. This is where things are going. We saw Amazon believes that by next year, I think it is, on Black Friday, they're gonna sell more phones than computers for the first time ever. And so we're just seeing it's going that direction, and that's a form factor. And forget mobile, just the form factor of wearable electronics that really communicates real-time all the time, right? So So I think that what we do, or not think, but what we do specifically as a company is we offer a solution that breaks multiple different barriers. So coming back into the organizational and the cultural, we actually service multiple different ecosystems in one coherent solution that abstracts from the legacy environment. So it's not about replacing it, it's about extending the lifecycle of the investment, hundreds of millions, billions of dollars over years, extending that. into the future where consumers are the 27-year-olds who are— their lives are totally digital, right? And I think that's what we do, and we do it real well. It's about time to market, really essential. Of course, reliability and scalability. So airlines are mission-critical businesses. They expect everything to be the same. They're running 24/7 shops. So just like any traditional online merchant, Amazon, they're running their business 24/7, but they've got the legacy constraint of a bank, right? So Banks still do batch jobs at night. You go to a bank after midnight, they close down for a while. Airlines can't do that. They run their stuff full-time, real-time, 24/7. And I think what we deliver is the abstraction capability from that legacy and the ability to service the digital channel end-to-end with a really fast time to market. So what used to take, you know, 9, 12, 18, 24 months, we do in 1 to 3 months. And I think That's very essential because it's about revenue dollars at the end.

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