Cover Genius, SVP Strategic Partnerships, Peter Smith, at the CAPA Airline Leader Summit Americas 2025

Transcript

Peter Smith:It's happening because customers today, Richard, they demand a lot more than they have in the past. It used to be the case that an airline would fly you from A to B, but what we're seeing much more today is, and we've heard it today here at the event, airlines are very much adopting a retail approach. They want to be a one-stop shop. So they want to be able to better service their customers end to end in their entire journey. And so that whole approach is shifting because, of course, the way which airlines increase their overall revenue is to ensure that they're interacting and conversing with customers at every single point of the journey, both before they purchase, throughout their entire trip, and then again when they get home. Because by doing that, of course, they increase the lifetime value of their customers. It's no longer good enough— to my previous point, it's no longer good enough to just offer customers an off-the-shelf product and hope that that suits their needs. You know, as generations move on, there's a much higher expectation for personalization in their everyday life. We want things fast, we want them to be relevant, and we want them to be personalized to us as an individual, not a broad-brush approach. And this goes for all walks of life. But particularly when it comes to travel and the way in which we like to move around the world. And so airlines really have to ensure that they're engaging with customers on a one-to-one level to ensure they're giving customers what they need. And in doing so, there's a real return for airlines in that we've heard today that the Net Promoter Score or customer satisfaction scores are actually higher for customers that take out ancillaries. Than for those that don't. Some of the anecdotal reasons they've given for that today is that airlines are helping customers to enrich their trip with relevant products, and they can only really do that through proper personalization and working with the right technology partners that can enable that. I talked about technology just briefly there. That's going to be one of the biggest challenges that airlines have when it comes to implementing new ancillary products. Is that typically they're based on legacy systems with spaghetti code. And so having to unpick that is really quite difficult. Furthermore, they're often having to work with third parties who might not share their same ethos or approach to, say, technology and a technology stack. So working with a partner that shares your customer focus but is able to really be flexible in terms of how they integrate their technology into your system. And that by doing that, that's how you're really going to ensure that you can then deliver on things like proper personalization. You can increase loyalty by ensuring you're having ongoing conversations with your customers and that you're really enriching their trip with relevant products. And you're doing it in a way that really helps to enhance their entire journey. So instead of the old style view of ancillaries are just going to be a barrier to a customer making the transaction of their flight. Actually, it's completely switching that mindset into, by offering proper personalized experiences, we can really enhance the customer's trip, therefore having happier customers, therefore having more loyal customers into the future.

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