Digital Outlook: True, Fast And Profitable Innovation – Speeding Up The Transformation Of The Industry

Transcript

William Owen:Speeding up the transformation is the topic of conversation. For years in the aviation industry, being digital has meant selling seats and outsourcing most of the work to do that as well. Smart mobile and Wi-Fi on board and soon NDC are going to changed that completely. We've heard a lot about the need to own and know the customer. So now that the whole customer experience has become a source of competitive advantage, what does that mean for the airlines in speeding up the transformation? Should they— how do they build their own in-house digital capability? Hugh, your company is a digital native, so can we start with an external view? What is it about the legacy airlines that is keeping things a little bit on the slow side at the moment?

Hugh Aitken:Probably a couple of thoughts. I think the first thing to say is there's huge difference in the airlines. So we've just had Wizz here, who we would say are at one degree of actually being quite digitally enabled. And you've got Lufthansa, who are very digitally enabled actually. They're investing in startups and innovation as core to their business. At the other end, you've got very traditional airlines who don't even have a mobile website that works particularly well. So there's huge difference. A couple of things. One is I think the traditional systems that power an awful lot of what airlines are doing are still old. You know, there's still very old systems. You were mentioning last night, I'll leave it for you to say, there's still old systems running core airline functionality, which does— and that means there's not flexibility. I think secondly, there's a culture thing. If you look at— so I've moved from an airline to a tech company, and if you look at tech companies, the mindset is completely different. You know, we're running hundreds of experiments every day. And if one of them fails, we just quickly move on to the next one. We have a mindset of fail forward. So if it goes wrong, let's not put any blame. Let's just learn from it and go and do the next thing. So there's a huge experimental and agile mindset, and we work in very, very short timescales. If we're not doing stuff today that's not relevant in 6 months' time, we won't exist in 18 to 24 months' time. So we constantly have to be reinvesting ourselves. The mindset of an airline is longer. If nothing else, they operate in 2 seasons a year, summer and winter. That drives an inherent mindset in an airline. And so I think there's that, plus the fact a lot of their legacy systems are old and cumbersome and, and don't help with innovation really.

William Owen:Ben, you are an airline, you work for an airline. Is that the experience of Lufthansa today, or have you started to move things along a bit?

Benjamin Pfeifer:Thanks for the good question. Yeah, I would say it's totally the experience. We are old legacy and do nothing. So a non-digital company? No, indeed. I think you mentioned it before. What we internally— we do speak about a kind of 2-engine system, and that's probably the mistake of an airline industry coming with that historical part. Of course, we are a safety operation, and that's all what we did in the past. And what we did in the past was maintaining safety operations. So part of the culture is, of course, the core, having that operational part. But internally, we talk about the 2 engines and say, yes, of course you need engine one. This engine needs to run, and that's your safety operation. But don't forget, culture-wise, you need a second engine, and that second engine, yeah, that can fall.

Hugh Aitken:Mm-hmm.

Benjamin Pfeifer:But nevertheless, it's an engine where you can try things. So what we do, I think, yes, we are not a tech company so far, and I think, of course, we are not that speedy like some startups. And therefore, you mentioned it before, for us it's pretty important to go into that partner network. Have a voice at the market. We do have that Lufthansa Innovation Hub in Berlin. We just established Lufthansa Innovation Hub in Singapore, and that's where we believe to have a deeper look at the market, who's out there and with whom could we partner. And part of that partnering means, of course, adapting internal processes and having also adapted internal organization. That's how we do it.

William Owen:So the old way of partnering was big IT, and we heard yesterday about Emirates working with— on huge programs with IBM, Microsoft, SAP. What's the new way of partnering in terms of— we're not necessarily talking about big 2-year programs that start off with a 6-month RFP and lots of very, very long-winded decision-making. How do you speed that up?

Benjamin Pfeifer:Yeah, probably I think one of the most critical parts that we do have in terms of digitization that we are working with our Corporate governance that does not fit into today's times. So what we did, and I'm part of the digital team of Lufthansa's digital team, what we did is we established a digital fund where we really have fast decisions, where we have bold decisions from, from the first day on, and we don't have that hassle in before and are ready to have a bet. And that's what we need also in our industry, just Have a bad and going some, some new ways. So partnering means, of course, yeah, it's, it's not that Lufthansa and all this legacy or corporate players, as you name them, do have the view to maintain everything or to have their own IT in a full step. It's, it's about you and these companies, like I mentioned with Berlin and Singapore. Yes, of course, we are looking at the market, and partnering means trust, and let's do more out of what what Lufthansa can deliver and what new players can deliver and deliver something new for the market from a customer-centric perspective.

William Owen:Kevin, you've partnered with a number of airlines. What's the basis of a good partnership and likewise a bad one?

Kevin Clark:Yeah, so I guess, I mean, it starts with trust. Like any relationship, both parties, or even more than both parties, sometimes multiple parties, have got to bring something to the relationship. I mean, as Hugh said, there's lots of legacy systems out there, but there's lots of very, very interesting and new technology that can be applied quickly. It might work, but it also might not work. And culturally, organizations have got to be able to look at that, decide if it's— experiment with it, decide if something's going to work. If not, move on from it. And that's a very cultural thing. And we get involved in that because we are a technology company. Our business is principally around the development of software and the platform technologies. And I'm gonna give you an example. We did some work with Virgin Atlantic recently. Virgin Atlantic is, you know, an airline that has a very good in-flight entertainment system in RED. Its product's called RED. But it's a very traditional system. It's a seatback. It's a thing that you peck on the seat in front and it irks the person in front of you while they're trying to rest. But it's a very traditional system and it moves along the way those systems do. But Virgin decided they had a kind of constituency that they wanted to engage more in their flight experience, which are passengers who are either partially sighted or blind, who have difficulty using a system that's out there, that they know it's there but they can't use it. So they wanted to see if they could do something that would allow those passengers to get more engaged. So we know Virgin, we know some people in Virgin, we had a bit of a conversation, we said, well, let's just go and look at something we could come up with that might help there. And we brought another party in, which is society in the UK called the Guide Dogs for the Blind. And between the 3 of us, we came up with some ideas of something we could do in the in-flight entertainment system. Took that back to Virgin and the, and the, and I guess the constituency group got some feedback on that because it wasn't quite right. We changed that. It went into service literally less than 3 months after the idea had come up. Now to do that, Virgin one had to step outside the technology base and secondly had to culturally say You know, this is not a top-down decision about what we want to get, and we've got a process, we need board approval. It needed to be something that just had to get on with what we would call in technology sense a skunkworks. You go off and create something, and then you, you tinker at the edges until it works, and it's out there. And that system's now flying on every, every Virgin aircraft, every flight that Virgin puts out there. So, so that's where the, you know, there's a culture element to that, there's a technological element to that, there's a partnership element to that. And it wasn't just one, one part, 2 partners, it was 3 partners in that case. But bringing that together in the kind of the sort of environment that says, you know what, we're going to do this together and we'll make it work. And it might not be perfect starting with, but we'll change as it goes along, got us to the right place in the end very quickly.

William Owen:So, Kristian, is that typical, that degree of partnership and speed, or is there something airlines are missing out on?

Kristian Gjerding:Well, I think airlines got A couple of different problems. I agree with the culture. I think that's a big issue. Airlines are a lot like banks or governments in many ways. So there's a lot of corporate governance, and for a good reason. Obviously, they're flying people around at 500 miles an hour, 10K up, so that, that's kind of significant. And I think that flows into how airlines operate. But I think they've got to kind of segregate the various compartments, right? So you've got one that operates with actually flying planes and everything around that, and there's a sort of digitalization around that, that's significant, which is about better service and cost savings and more efficiency. But that's got to be really very safely structured because that's about safety. And then there is all the stuff about selling, right? And I think to Jozsef's presentation, which was perfect, I think, in many ways, you know, they've seen a way to sort of deal with their consumers in the right way. And I think to To that effect, there is not just a matter of culture, which has to be slightly different in terms of how you interact with your vendors. I think you need a little bit of vendor disentanglement to give more flexibility for, for, for, for, for the airlines. But I also think to, to, to Hugh's statement about tech companies versus airlines, it is 2 different things, right? An airline is, again, running a really serious type of operation, and that has one requirement. But then there is the other side, which is about meeting your consumers or your travelers where they want And I think those kind of partnerships requires, of course, trust. I totally agree, trust and expertise. For us, it was a road to learn. We came from an enterprise background as a company, tech enterprise background, and we had to learn the airline space for a while. It does take special knowledge. You can't just go in and not understand sort of the needs of that environment. But I also say that they are wasting a tremendous amount of time on traditional old processes that is—

Kevin Clark:Yeah.

Kristian Gjerding:This doesn't really yield anything. And we've seen in our client base that they start the RFI, RFP process, which is just, you know, a 2-year thing or a year thing. It can be a long time. And at the time they're done, it's almost obsolete, right? So they're putting themselves in a box where they're not getting really fast to market and capitalizing on the opportunity. And I think the net reality is that they're just leaving a lot of cash on the table. We call it lost revenue opportunity.

William Owen:Yeah.

Kristian Gjerding:And I think the culture and also the structure of these businesses needs to change. The way that they view revenue as the most important part in the commercial side, again, separating the operations from the revenue generation. I think in the revenue generation, they need to restructure dramatically into where revenue is the order of the day. And I think that's what Wizz Air does really well. I mean, one thing is they operate the fleet really well. That's not my expertise at all, but they really know how to sell to their customers.

William Owen:So speed of decision-making is one issue, but connectedness is another. Airlines are split into operational or organizational silos, which means that if you want to make a change for customers that's enabled by digital, then you've got to be able to connect the digital team up with operations and operations up with finance because you need to get the investment for it. How do you start to get that flatter organizational structure and change the position of digital May I break it a bit up?

Benjamin Pfeifer:Because I'm the airline representative in that panel. And yeah, hopefully I need to give you a better picture on that. I think what we do right now, and honestly, I think we are in the middle of a change organization-wise, turning the company to a customer-centric company. What we did in the past, and I think you heard yesterday Carsten Spohr here also on the panel, Of course, there's a consolidation, and from a perspective, from a former perspective, we are talking about the metal consolidation. So buying aircraft and talking about capacities. Right now we are moving into the next direction and talking about a passenger consolidation, or let's say a UX consolidation. That's where we spend our money in. So what we currently decided and building in is a customer data hub where we say, yes, it's a bit like— Where's AirMention before? So therefore, we believe to invest much more in the passenger. And of course, you should be aware, or our company should be aware, if you're an Austrian Airlines customer, to have also the same rights and to have also the same history if you fly Lufthansa. Not only on a Miles More perspective, it's just more and beyond. It's the UX of that company. So what we are working in, of course, we are building the infrastructure data-wise. That's important for us. But what we are also building is, and you mentioned it, What we're also building is the capabilities in the organization, because from, from a parts perspective, of course, we moved in a distribution channel and a sales channel, revenue management channel. We are coming from a network department. But honestly, if you look in these old, old organizational structure, you won't find the customer at all, because that's the layer in between, and it's the horizontal layer that we did not serve so far. Just from an organizational perspective. And right now we are moving into the next direction and have defined 6 layers of customers, and that's how we develop products so far. So we are looking into the business traveler, family traveler, and of course you can be each of those types in different scenarios because you're a trip business traveler and a family trip traveler as well. But nevertheless, we are driving a product perspective from, from that on, and that moves also in the direction, of course, that they ask for new forms of working because it's not only silo thinking in terms of you're responsible for capacity management and who else might come up to that capacity. You're just managing it. It's different. And therefore, we have— of course, we are dealing with the question of new forms of working and new forms of collaboration.

William Owen:Doesn't that create some tensions in the business though, shifting from a business requirements focus to a customer needs focus in terms of particularly things like people's KPIs? So the sales team has its KPIs. They just want sales. The rewards team have their KPIs. They want to get the rewards up. And likewise everyone else. So how do you make that switch and avoid the inevitable conflict that might arise?

Benjamin Pfeifer:Yeah, honestly, good question. I think we do not have the final answer for that. What we do, it's a bit like others in Berlin would say, that's our digital garage. We're talking about in the airline industry about our digital garage. hangar. So let's get, get people to come together and collaborate in, in a room. I mean, it's, it's not about you're sales and I'm network, and I'm Miles More and you're Lufthansa Technik. It's about what do we want to achieve from a customer perspective, and what's the pain that we do solve. So it's, it's much more driven from a project perspective.

Kevin Clark:Mm-hmm.

Benjamin Pfeifer:It's not— we're breaking a bit up the line organization in Indeed, and I think you saw that in the past from Lufthansa perspective as well, that we are talking about a matrix organization, that it's not about how Austrian Airlines delivers their customer tomorrow, it's about how do we deliver as Lufthansa Group a customer beyond airlines, beyond brands, in his personal UX. But it's, it's a path to go.

William Owen:So it's about collaboration and working together in teams and presumably different disciplines working together.

Benjamin Pfeifer:Right.

William Owen:Which raises what seems like quite a critical question. We've talked about We heard about Google and Amazon in the previous session competing in terms of distribution and bringing customers in. There's also a massive war for talent that seems to be emerging at the moment. How do airlines and also anybody working in the aviation industry start to develop talent, the talent that's absolutely necessary for developing digital products? So Hugh, what, what's the situation for Skyscanner? You're in Edinburgh, that's your base. How do you attract talent?

Hugh Aitken:With difficulty sometimes, I think. So we have a team lined up outside the gates of Edinburgh University every May and outside every graduation saying, come and work for us. Our biggest challenge is we can't get enough engineers to build the stuff we want, and that's the same with everybody. And so I think we've soaked up every engineer in London, which is why we've opened development centers in Barcelona, London, Sofia, Budapest, and actually Shenzhen. So we've taken on recently over 100 engineers in Shenzhen to build one specific part of our product, and we've got another 100 starting in Beijing in a couple of weeks. Now we're fortunate because we've got a parent company in Ctrip who do not lack resource to help us do these things, but that's the big challenge, and it'll be even more, you know, engineers like working on difficult things and like seeing a real impact with what they're doing. So So they naturally gravitate, and they also like a certain work environment, which tech companies provide them. And they're very different mindsets than, you know, somebody who works in network planning or a loyalty guy in an airline. And you have to create the culture. And so I think there's a challenge with, particularly in airlines, and how do you create that culture and how do you attract and retain tech talent? We do a lot. So our whole business ethos is we're a technology company who happens to be doing travel. rather than a travel company. And so we're very firmly and want to be rooted in that technology piece. And we also do a lot of collaboration. That's something you've touched on actually. So that's not just about us entering into contracts, it's doing joint hackathons with IATA, doing joint hackathons with our competitors. You know, we give our data to TripAdvisor to help strengthen their products and markets. We do that with hundreds of other companies. So it's collaborating with others and you learn from them and you're improving your product, which what your competitors are saying is lagging in the data that you're giving them. And that's a kind of real thing. You know, an airline collaborating with their biggest competitor to improve their own product would probably be not something that would culturally, traditionally culturally fit an airline, but it's something which in tech is done day in, day out. I'm sure you see that with what you do.

William Owen:Yeah. So Kevin and Kristian, how do you work with aviation, with airlines? Yeah, what's the talent like on their side? Well, because you're having to connect Connect your systems up with theirs.

Kevin Clark:Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, interestingly, Hugh and I actually live in the same labor pool because this is the Scottish end of the, of the benches that we're on. Although we tend to go to Dundee University rather than Edinburgh University because it's closer to us. There you go. Yeah, so airlines, I mean, we're working with all types of airlines from, from, you know, full-service carriers through to low-cost carriers. And the full-service, I think, have the aspiration to do technical stuff. You look at what, you know, JetBlue do or IAG do with their Hangar 51, or to the extent of Lufthansa with actually creating the companies. And that's the commitment, that's the level of commitment. It's less so in the low-cost sector, although low-cost tends to be— I think there are more people in the low-cost sector who fit that kind of profile of they are younger, they are more dynamic, they've come through using systems in the way that their customers might use systems. So they're more switched on to Or rather, they're certainly very accommodating of knowing that there's technology out there. You don't have to build something, so there isn't a mindset that has to be built internally. It can be sourced externally, except where there maybe is something that might differentiate and you maybe want to hold that as a differentiator. Because I guess the thing about the way the technology world is developing is the technology is generally available to everyone, so everyone can use it. It's the application of it. that makes the differentiation, not necessarily the technology itself. And, you know, 2 organizations applying the same technology, one can be very good at it, one can be less good, and you know who's going to win out of that story. So what we find is we've got— it also has a little bit of impact depending where you are in the world, but we find airlines will engage with us and with other parties doing similar sorts of things, or just technology companies, in different ways. depending on what they want to get out of the relationship, their openness, the extent to which they can see it bringing differentiation to what they offer, and where they are in the world. So, you know, the Asian aviation market is much, much more LCC-focused than just about anywhere else in the world. For sure, there are LCCs elsewhere, new LCCs, but the Asian market is very dominated by LCCs, and they're all looking for—

Hugh Aitken:Yeah.

Kevin Clark:the differentiation against their competition in the market. So much more desire to trial things, see if it works, move on from others. And we see that in the kind of engagements we have with airlines and the nature of the airlines we're actually dealing with.

William Owen:So is localization a big challenge for digital to solve for all of you in terms of there are now different ways to pay? There is Alipay, there is WePay, there is Apple Pay, etc. There are different ways to buy, whether it's mobile or wherever. What impact is that having on the way that you run your business and get to know your customers?

Kevin Clark:I mean, expectations, you know, the expectations depending on where you are in the world about paying for things, for example, you know, can be quite different. I mean, Kristian, you'll be able to talk very well to that because that's your business, but it does change. You develop a product in Europe which works on European or US, which works on the payment models, and you go to China and it's You know, Alipay or WePay or whatever, and it's— you need a different way of handling that.

William Owen:If the airlines get their act together, so this is for you, Hugh, what does that mean for your business in terms of where you exist, whether you're on board the plane, if there's Wi-Fi on board, for example? I mean, do you see the digitization of airlines as a threat or as actually a benefit for your business model?

Hugh Aitken:Absolutely a benefit. So we have— our mantra is very, very clear in Skyscanner. We're traveler first, partner second, and Skyscanner third. So everything we do is for the traveler. And then we think about what's right for our partners, airlines being first amongst equals in that equation for us. And finally, we think about what's right for us as a company, shareholder return or whatever that looks like. So with that in mind, you know, we believe there's still a huge amount to be done to improve the experience for travelers. So somebody comes to Skyscanner, starts their search, and we send them to an airline and they go to a mobile optimized site that doesn't work in the 39 languages of the 40 that we feature. So if airlines can get their digital assets and their, their, all of their digital to work across every platform in every country, that I think will help the traveler. And that's got to be good. If you look at the travel cycle, people go to— I'm gonna get this number wrong, Kristian, we talked about it last night— about, was it over 20 if not 30 different places to search for travel? So that means airlines have got to get their content and get inspirational stuff in all of these places, be it Instagram or Pinterest, wherever it is. So all of that we believe is right for the traveler, and that's what we're doing in ours. How do we create a marketplace that airlines come, we can show their brand, And we need more help with the airlines to get there, to get that complete flow through all of it. So we don't see it as a threat at all. I think it's— it will help the traveler, and that's what's got to guide all of us in travel, is doing the right thing for the traveler and making travel easy, because travel is not straightforward. I think searching and booking travel in many cases is not straightforward yet. So we've still got an awful lot to do, and that's what keeps us going every single day.

William Owen:So we heard a lot about the big global end-to-end piece yesterday, and that, that all sounds a bit of a fantasy. Everyone's struggling and fighting to get their bit of it right now. Who are going to be the winners and losers? Is it going to be the airlines? Is it going to be the travel agents? Is it going to be Google and Amazon, or the GDSs, or others? Who's going to come out tops? What is the going to look like in 5 years' time?

Benjamin Pfeifer:I don't—

Kristian Gjerding:sorry, I don't think you can, you can talk about winners or losers only, because I think, you know, I don't think Google's gonna start flying planes, no offense. I think that's just not in their business model, nor will Apple. And I think that though, though I agree with Josef's sort of perception of how they sit in this, I think that that's a very real sort of not only threat but opportunity for airlines. I think it's a partnership reality. And I think that when an airline is looking at where they're going to go in terms of meeting their clients head-on, the fact is that Apple and Google are driving that agenda, and Amazon, right? I mean, these are the companies that just are massively controlling what happens out in this environment. And I think you also said something really interesting. And if I look at my own children who are 7 and 10, they're total digital. They communicate with their friends globally. They play globally. They do a lot of different things globally. They don't look to anything I would normally do or what I was thinking of when I was 7 or 10 in reference to how I would engage with the world. And I just think that's a fact that you need to live up to. And so Google and Apple are most certainly participants in this, but I don't think you can say there's going to be massive winners or losers. And the same for the travel agents or OTAs or mega search engines or whatever you want to call it. The net reality is travelers will look for travel where they find it most relevant. They will obviously look at whatever it is that their segment is for. So if you're looking for lowest price and point-to-point, you're going to find that. And if you're looking for business class or something in that area, you're going to look for somewhere else. I also think, quite frankly, that the consumers— it's not just the 27-year-olds that are actually quite capable of using mobile devices. Just look around in here, half the people are on their phones all the time, which is cool. I mean, that's just what's happened, right? We get our social feeds, we communicate with the office, we Do a lot of different things. So we're already on that. And I think that I'm not 27. I might look it, but I'm not. Yeah, 28, 29.

William Owen:Yeah, yeah.

Kristian Gjerding:And I've been for CellPoint 11 years. That's what's happened. So don't join. So the point being is that I just think that we— when you talk about these things, you talk about digitalization. Again, to your point and to Hugh's point, this is about point in time. Just get the stuff out there and start generating the revenues that you actually need to generate from this channel, from the consumers who want to do it. Which again is separate from managing your core product, right? And I think your core product either works or it doesn't work. That's a different thing. I don't think you can say you're gonna lose or win on that.

Benjamin Pfeifer:That makes sense. Nevertheless, Maya, back— come back to your question. I think it's, as I mentioned it before, a kind of consolidation. It's not only more consolidation of metal, it's much more above. And as we heard it from Riz before, yes, we do believe— I would not talk about owning the customer because the customer owns Probably himself. But at the end, it's who's serving the best customer need. And yes, of course, Google and Amazon and all these guys will never fly an airplane. They are not interested in, of course. But is it worthwhile just to be the operator at the end? So it remains the question, who's dealing with the need and the pain of the customers? Who's understanding the customer at all? And that might be, of course, I'm also strong Miles More background, as you know. Might, might come from that picture. But nevertheless, I mean, loyalty is not anymore being loyal. Loyalty is understanding what you do as a final customer at all touchpoints, and it's much more beyond travel. We want to understand you as a person and deliver much more value. And it's not a value in terms of economy business first. That's not the sort of customer segmentation we are talking of. It's, it's more the value— understand you as a unique customer and delivering Delivering your product, your travel product, and it might be, might be even beyond travel, even if we operate only travel.

Hugh Aitken:William, one of the things that struck me, I think it was Sue Hoon was interviewing last night the Winding Tree chap, and she said, oh, who's going to disrupt travel? And the 2 analogies I always think about is, right, what are 2 of the most established industries apart from aviation? Taxis, surface transportation as referred to rather than taxis, and hotels. And if I look at them, they have been disrupted by bigger consumer forces. If you look at the top search travel brands in the world, you know, Airbnb are up there, and Uber are now one of the biggest transportation companies in the world. So I think, where does change and where does disruption come from, apart from Skyscanner? Who knows? I think there's, there's probably somebody sitting in a garage somewhere in Berlin or somewhere in the world thinking about something at the moment that could completely change travel, and we don't know what that is yet. And I think that, that's always what's exciting, but also a challenge for all of us. And I guess the question for airlines and all of us is, well, how do we respond to that? You know, do airlines say, nope, everything's got to be booked on wizzair.com or lufthansa.com? Or do we say, actually, God, they're doing something that is completely changing the dynamics of how people search and plan for travel? And I can guarantee you, it probably will be a teenager in a bedroom at the moment who'll probably come up with an idea, or sitting on a floor of his mate's apartment in New York like Airbnb.

William Owen:So where does that teenager in the bedroom, or perhaps the airlines losing their addiction to outsourcing, leave the big integrators who are with their big 2, 3, 4, 5-year programs that are based on the assumption that the world will be the same in 5 years' time? Where does it leave the likes of Amadeus? Kevin, can you?

Kevin Clark:This feels a pointed question. Where does it leave them? It leaves them challenged like everyone else. It leaves them challenged and challenged in what they do and how they do it. Do they want to be a part of that or do they want to just, you know, carry on with the path that they're on and say, you know, this is the right path and we will make it prevail and hope that it goes away? That's the— it leaves them exposed, I would say. But But the flip to that, of course, is to say, well, actually what we need to do is we need to go out and embrace that and look at that and encourage that and make it part of what we do. And I think that's the— that's part of what's changing. It's a changing landscape. It's not— there's no big breakpoints. There might be disruptors, big disruptors, but there's no big breakpoints. It just changes the landscape. And you asked the question about winners and losers, and it does— you do have to think about that beyond just the airlines because You know, even the retail in airport, to take a pretty esoteric example, retail in airport, you know, it's a big moneymaker for the airports. We all have to do that sort of almost IKEA-type trip through things to get to the departure gates. But what if that retail experience can move on to the aircraft now? So it doesn't actually have to happen in the airport, it can happen in the aircraft. Someone's going to sit there for 3 hours, 8 hours, 10 hours, whatever. Make that part of the flight experience, not the—

Hugh Aitken:Yeah.

Kevin Clark:not the airport experience. And suddenly the retailers that aren't awake to that, and the technology is there to do it, the retailers that aren't aware to that could find that that market's gone. Where's it gone? Well, the passengers have just walked right past them because they're buying on the planes now. And in fact, they don't have to carry it home. It can get set up to be taken home for them when they come back or whatever. So there's disruptors out there, or potential disruptors, that are kind of hiding in plain sight, and the technology makes those possible. And that's, that's what we've got to keep an eye out for.

William Owen:So the joy of Wi-Fi on board.

Kevin Clark:And yeah, yeah, it's—

William Owen:last question, Ben, for you. Where are you going next? What do you see the next big change being in terms of both revenue generation or the, the customer experience and the difference that's going to be in Lufthansa in 5 years' time or less? Let's say 1 or 2 years.

Benjamin Pfeifer:Hopefully less.

Hugh Aitken:Yeah.

Benjamin Pfeifer:Let me take that example. And I like it. I like it really That— but how you manage— mention it, board experience. I think in terms of any sort of digitization, we see it in the distribution channel, we see it in the sales channel, and there's a lot of fighting spirit, and we all don't know where the final game looks— how the final game looks like at the end. And that's one real good benefit that an airline has also in the digital way. We still have the customer physical on board. And that's what remains. So what I, what I really believe is there's much more to do coming from today's perspective, of course, where we just focus on how to entertain people on board, coming, coming to a wholesaler or retailer on board. And that's probably the next step that we're currently looking at.

William Owen:Right. All right, we'll wrap it up there. Thank you very much.

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