Distribution And Selling Challenges: NDC To The Rescue?

Transcript

Ian Heywood:Okay, the way we're going to try and spend this next 40 minutes is I welcome you to use your phones, either through the Slido app or through the Slido web, and ask any questions you want. Hopefully my presentation will spark some questions. And then I'm really delighted we've got a great— we haven't got a big panel, it's one-on-one, but we've got Tamur, who's the SVP for the Lufthansa Group in distribution. And as everyone knows, Lufthansa have been a real leader in NDC, some of it not in a good way, some of it in a good way as well. So it's going to be a lively panel session as well. But what I'm going to do is go through a quick 20 minutes to bring you up to speed. Some of these have been going on a little while for the slides. I apologize about that, but unfortunately so has NDC. It has been going on for, it appears, ages and ages. What I am looking forward to is 2020, where I think we are going to start to make some real headway and we will start talking about a little bit less about the technology, and we start talking about how you can use NDC to improve the industry and improve airlines' revenue. Sometimes there is a lot of tension around. When I was down in Australia halfway through the year, a lot of tension in that market there between the agents, the corporates, and the airlines. And some of that is because there's been this expectation of people talking about commercially how can NDC work, but the basics of the technology isn't there in place yet. And that's what's causing some of the tech— some of the tension. So what I thought I'd do is talk a little bit about both of those. The other thing I want to do, and I'm as guilty as anyone, is it's very easy for us to say, you know, the current system, it's really good, it works. There's things that it can't do. with NDC Edifact, and the basic schemas, you know, they're not really fit for business. But there's been this huge amount of work that's been going on. So 17.2, for if people are not sure how the IATA schemas work, 17.2 is the baseline schema that IATA have adopted, and it's got all of these functionalities. And I'm not going to go through these slides, don't worry about that. But what I did want to just show was the sort of work that's been going on for each of the schemas. There's 2 published every year. 18 is the year, 19 is the year, and then .1 and .2 for the first half of the year and for the second half of the year. So that's what's happening. And you can see that there's these IATA working groups that have been going, yeah, this functionality is missing in the schema, that's what we need to put in there. And this is an ex— these are, you know, what's gone on into all the subsequent schemas. Part of the problem is most of the airlines are connected to either 17.2 or 18.1, and they haven't adopted all of the improvements that are going forward. So it's not until you start perhaps bringing in the next baseline schema as 20.2 or 21.1 or whenever it's going to be when you get that. But you can see 19.2 that's just been released got a huge amount of improvements, a lot around servicing. So where people were saying the schemas, yeah, they're not fit for business, a lot of agents have said that. A huge amount of work gone on in improving those. And you can— oh, I thought I had a 20. And 20.1, you can see that for the first quarter of next year or the first half of next year, again, a huge amount has been proposed that's going on. All of that work's happening at the moment. So that's, you know, really good. Part of the problem, especially for us as a GDS, is that the way that you augment that is there's no standard practice. So as a lot with a lot of the schemas is, you know, are they standard, are they not? And we are finding that about 80% is a standard schema. It's a pattern you can copy and paste it from one airline to another. And then there's about 20% that there isn't. And that's what takes a lot of work. Also, if an airline— some of the, you know, some of those enhancements are regulatory, like Indian GST tax, you know, they have to be adopted. Some of them are just there because they're servicing, they're nice to do, they're what the industry needs. But there is no standard of getting those back into the schema. So we are going to live for quite a while in a bit of a messy situation. On the commercial side, which is what I'm really looking forward to moving to for next year, Is really, for me, it's about the capabilities. It's how do we improve this industry. I have a background of an airline sales capability, and that's what I would look forward to on this is how can you use these to improve the revenue of an airline. But also you can turn it on the head and you can say, how do agents use this to improve their revenue? How can they start doing things differently? These have been the standard ones that I've been talking about for at least the last year, if not 2 years. They're pretty standard.

Tamur Goudarzi Pour:Thank you.

Ian Heywood:been accepted by the whole industry as like the main ones that are important and that the airlines are looking at using. Know the customer at the time of search. So with the NDC, the booking's going to be made in the airline system, not in the GDS system. I'm talking about third-party bookings made through agents. So they know who it is so they can return an appropriate offer. That's the plan. Fares to offers. Agents want to— sorry, airlines want to increase their ancillary sales. But at the moment, with EMDs, 2 swipes of credit cards, things like that, the old practices that are still there until you get one order, then the best way, easiest way for airlines to increase their ancillary sales, that revenue that they really want because they make a lot of profit on them, is to increase their offers that they're making through their fares. So you start selling more and more fare families, and I've got some examples of that. This is a really busy slide, but it's a good example again in that you've got the fare at the top of the, of the box, of the blue box, and then you've got all of the things that you can add on to that. And we're talking to airlines that are saying we're going to put together about 15 to 20 different fare families. They're going to have those on their shelf when the customer makes a request. then they will return 3 or 4 that they think are the most appropriate. So they're not looking at putting 15 or 20 fare families or offers out back to the customer. They're going to put what they think are the most, the best 3 or 4. And that's how they're going to do it to start with. So people talk about personalization, but to start with, it's going to be in a limited way. It isn't going to be building an offer from scratch. They will have those on the shelves. The other ones that airlines are looking at doing a lot around is dynamic pricing, smoothing the pricing curve, moving beyond the 26 fare buckets that the industry uses today. And you can see that if you can do that, then there's a lot of way that the airlines can make more and more revenue. And most of the airlines we're talking to think that they can make between 1% and 4% by having these additional fare points in place. They also become a lot more competitive against the low-cost carriers. That's really important in Europe and in Southeast Asia where you've got a lot of competition with the low-cost carriers. And then personalization, differentiation. A lot of the airlines don't like talking about differentiation because that's where they're going to start treating different customers and different agents differently. I'm sure it's going to happen. No one's really prepared to stand on stage and talk about that. Are they going to go to Amex, you're not going to get as good fares as BCD, or not? But they have that ability because they know it's Amex that's making that request at the time. Then they can return a fare for Amex. Then they know it's BCD and their customers, and they can return those fares. Will they be exactly the same? I don't know. If one supports the airline a lot more than the other, then why should they be the same? That's me with my old airline hat on. So we will see where that goes. That's the things that I'm looking forward to next year, because as we start getting these things happening live in the marketplace, we can monitor them, we can track them, we can see what's happening. And I look forward to coming back onto this stage to tell you about them and give you some real results. And the other thing that's going to be really interesting, and this is going to be a learning curve as well, is that the airlines are talking Sorry, yeah, they're moving into personalization, they're moving into retailing, and either us on our front end, the GDSs with their front ends, or the agents direct, if they're taking the feed from us or they're having a direct link into an airline, they've got to start building their own retailing platform. And you've got these more and more complicated offers coming out. How are you going to demonstrate those? How are you going to pass that information on to the end customer to make a decision. At the same time, when the screen size is getting smaller and smaller, and the most common screen size is going to be a mobile. So this is going to be really complicated. It isn't easy. And the other thing is there are not many, if any, real retailing experts in the aviation industry. And so the airlines have— and themselves And the, and the agents have got to bring those expertise into the industry so that we can know and learn from other companies that have been doing this. How do you do this in a really good, effective manner? It's very important for the airlines that we can demonstrate what their products are, how you can get the sales up to the next fare classes, etc., etc. But how do you do that in a cost-effective manner and in a manner that the end customer wants and likes to see. So we're going to see a lot of that happening at the moment going into next year and beyond. What's happening in the market at the moment? You're hearing a lot of this. You've got the airlines are saying we're going to do these offers. They're looking at growing ancillaries. They're all talking about these additional pricing points. They want to be dynamic. They want to be quicker. They want to be a lot more nimble on their feet. And you're going to see The start of personalization, but you're not going to see it down to an Ian Heywood level. You may see it down to Ian Heywood books through ATP level. You may see it Ian Heywood as a Travelport. You may see it as Ian Heywood as a gold card member on British Airways level, but you're not going to see it down to the individual person. Not next year, but that will come at some time. Carrots and sticks. So, um, Lufthansa knows all about sticks, not so much about the carrot side. So what we've got here is the airlines are using the carrots and sticks to encourage— I love that word encourage— they're using them to encourage the agents to book through the NDC channel. I'll show on the next slide why that's really important. But how are they doing that? Well, they're surcharging removing content from ATPCO, EDIFACT, and they're only making some fares available within the NDC channel. Now, to be fair to the airlines, some fares can only be made available into the, um, NDC channel. So if they're beyond the 26 booking classes, if they are, uh, more and more fare families, et cetera, et cetera, you can only distribute those via the API because the ATP EDIFACT doesn't have the capability to do that. But you're going to see a lot more of this. Why are we going to see a lot more of this? Well, we are still, despite what some airlines are saying, we are still right on the left-hand side of this. This is third-party distribution, you know, via travel agents of an airline's content. And the airlines want to move to the right-hand side. The reason they want to move to the right-hand side is that they want to use all of those sales capabilities that I was talking about. And you can only use those sales capabilities if the booking comes through an NDC API. So that is why they're trying to drive that adoption down the NDC. So you're seeing that the airlines will want to drive that. The problem that you've got at the moment is that there's a bit of cart before the horse because some of the airlines are taking those actions, removing content, surcharging, before the basic technology is in place. And so a lot of agents are struggling to get access to the NDC content because they can't get it through their method of choice, which is normally a GDS. Or if they do go direct to an airline, a lot of their bookings are not— their booking engines are not fit for business. Et cetera, et cetera. And so all of those are being smoothed out. They are all starting to go away. Travelport ourselves, we are live with Qantas. We're live with a European group. We're going to be live with a couple of American airlines by the end of the year, et cetera, et cetera. So it's all happening and the capability of our endpoints is getting better. And it's the same with my competitors as well. I'm not up here to do a sales pitch for Travelport. It's the same with our competitors. And the airlines are getting more sophisticated in what they can do as well. So the technology is starting to be where I thought it would have been about a year ago. But in the first quarter of next year, I think you'll see that that's going to be less of an inhibitor.

Tamur Goudarzi Pour:What do I—

Ian Heywood:my final slide. So what do I think is going to happen? What you are going to see is that the leading airlines and the GDSs will be connected up. We will be distributing that content. It will start to be— make it a lot easier for the agents to access it. The technology becomes less of an inhibitor, and then the industry starts concentrating more on how do you make these sales capabilities work? How do you start increasing your revenue? We're talking to a lot of airlines. We're talking to about 40 airlines at the moment, and there's more and more that are looking at their NDC ambitions, and they will come perhaps more public. But also when you hear the leading airlines start saying, yes, by smoothing out the booking curve I've managed to increase my revenue by 2%, I've become more effective against the low-cost carriers. When you can say, hey, I've just really increased my ancillary bookings by 10% because I'm selling more fare families, then the airlines that don't have NDC capability will be going, I need that. And that is something I predict will happen in the next couple of years. There's a long lead time for an airline to come live with NDC, but that's what I think you'll see. So you're going to get more and more airlines there. Agents and corporates, I haven't spoken too much about them in this because I'm limited for time. But what you'll see there is that the agents and the corporates are starting to talk to the airlines and say, hey, you've got these capabilities. Yes, you can differentiate content. Yes, you can personalize it. How can we work together? And we're working with a few corporates now and the agents and the airlines to say, right, can we do some trials? Can you now prove that by personalizing an offer for me, we will actually be able to, you know, it will be beneficial for me as a corporation? So it's starting to become what's the proof of the pudding as we move forward. And then finally, you're going to see more sticks and carrots. As the technology's in place, the airlines, for the reasons that I've explained, will need to drive more and more bookings down the NDC path. They've spent millions. Everyone in the industry is spending millions and millions. And so they will want to see more and more bookings coming down that pipeline when they're convinced that the technology is robust enough and it can handle it, etc., etc. And I think you'll start seeing some of that. In 2020, you'll see a lot more of it in 2021. So that was a quick rush through for me. I hope it was useful. I hope there's some new nuggets in there. What I'd like to do now is invite Tamur on stage with me, and we will take the the Slido questions. And if there's not that many coming through, then I will ask the questions. But this is a oh a wonderful opportunity. For you to, you know, ask anything you want. This is working now. Thank you. I don't need this now. Oh, I've been tested on technology. So while we're waiting for the first Slido questions, so we should hopefully see them there and the Slido should be up there. So, and if anyone's not used Slido before, if you see a question on there that you like, if you do that, it will come to the top of the screen and I tend to ask from the, the, the top down. So just while we're waiting for that to, to be set up, Tamur, you, do you agree with my capabilities? Do you think that's, is that why Lufthansa is, and Lufthansa Group, I should say, but Lufthansa is moving forward with NDC. Well, first of all, is it a GDS bypass?

Tamur Goudarzi Pour:No, I think first of all, Ian, I think I love your presentation. And then if you see these presentations and, and you would compare them like 3, 4 years ago to what I think we have seen from the industry, I think it's a quantum leap. And actually, I would have said that even that could have been my presentation. And so I think that changes— shows that there's a lot of change has happened in industry. with all stakeholders, and that we are now much further down the road, and you see, than maybe people sometimes think. There are still some issues, and you mentioned them. We can discuss that. But I think, first of all, while there has been disruption in the industry on this topic, and I think it needed disruption, and probably we have been one of the frontrunners in that in 2015, with all— I would say all the good and the bad things that happened. I I think right now it's really that we stick together as stakeholders, be it the GDS, be it the TMCs, be it the airlines and all the other players, to make it work. Because if we don't, somebody else will, and that's going to happen very quickly, I think. And that's something we really have to get our act together.

Ian Heywood:Yeah, so on Lufthansa, next, let's talk next year. Everyone's been talking 2020, so let's talk Of those capabilities that I, that I spoke about, would it be fair to say that sort of smoothing the pricing curve is, is important and you're going to be doing that? And are you going to be bringing in more fare families or offers, corporate offers, so, you know, the fare and the ancillaries together?

Tamur Goudarzi Pour:Absolutely. I mean, there are 2 components. One is the, of course, the, the access, the technological access that, that's that needs to be made possible. We are— I think we have made great inroads there on the leisure, on the OTA sphere. We are not yet 100% there end-to-end on the corporate side. I think that's the big roadblock still on the way. Concerning the content, I think things are moving very fast now. They have been sluggish at times. Sometimes the airlines have started to remove content to differentiate. Now it's starting to be the case that we're adding content and The mentioned example of yours is the continuous pricing. It's one where we're going to be live as the Lufthansa Group in Q1. And live means we are testing right now still, and we have announced it a while ago, so we took a bit longer to do that. But I can reassure that by end of Q1, we're going to be live with continuous pricing. And this is not just adding a few price points. This is fundamentally different. It's by really having here segmented willingness-to-pay estimations where you will then have really continuous price curve according to certain customer segments. By the way, not personalized yet.

Ian Heywood:Nice.

Tamur Goudarzi Pour:Segmented, very important. And there you will see that the customer actually gets a cheaper price than the traditional booking class. You will be able to compare that with the traditional representation in the classical distribution systems, and you realize at a given point in time under same conditions that this price will be cheaper, will be cheaper than the published price on the traditional booking curve. And why is that? And why we would make money then? Yeah, you would ask, why would you do that? We would do it because we will be able to manage better the capacities, also shorter towards departure, and particularly the volumes. By better estimating the willingness to pay, we will create greater volumes. And I think your estimation of potential benefits is pretty much in line what we actually expect. So we think it's still, you know, worthwhile, and it's going to be an additional value for the customer, but it's not currently available in the existing technological representation in traditional forms of, of GDS. So that's why we have to go that step and get NEC implemented. It's only one example, but there are many others in terms of ancillaries and making them also Also dynamic. We're currently also testing dynamic ancillaries with AI, and that's something we're going to bring very soon as well. We're testing it already. Yeah.

Ian Heywood:So yeah, when I was in, when I was in the airline, a 1 to 4% increase in revenue or yield was huge. So that's not to be sniffed at. And how are you going to create these pricing points? Are they, are you using double-digit On your, you know, so AA and AB and everything like that, or are you spot pricing them? Have you gone completely away from the ATP codes, you know, way?

Tamur Goudarzi Pour:And there will be parallel worlds. I mean, we will be, for some time to go, we will be in parallel worlds, and we will be omnichannel. And in this new world, there won't be any booking class anymore. There will be still the reference point of the booking class, but we will represent really a continuous price curve and And we really have their segmented prices. The trick that we still haven't done then after Q1 next year is then to combine them with dynamic ancillaries to dynamic packaging. I think that's still some time to go. I think that will take another 12-18 months, but that's also a reasonable timeframe. And then we come to dynamic bundling. As you rightly said, this will be based on bundles that, that we will offer to certain customer groups, and we have to be very, very careful that we don't confuse them. Simplification is at the same time, while you make this a very important thing, and you will not offer everything to everybody, try to keep it smart, clean, and simple, but hit the nerve of the customer. I think that will be the trick, and still some time to go for that, but we're starting step by step, and I think you will see a lot of additional content now in the very next near future.

Ian Heywood:One thing I didn't say when I was saying that the airlines are keen to move down this NDC path, um, you know, is so you can use the capabilities. But there is also from the airline side the complexity of managing a route, um, with both, you know, the old ATPCO/EDIFACT method, you know, your old traditional, um, you know, um, uh, yeah, methods throughout the airline, and then the new, um, NDC. Do you— are you got your vision? I'm not I don't want you to give me timescales, but if you've got a vision where you're going, we've got to get rid of doing it both ways and we want to be 100% NDC.

Tamur Goudarzi Pour:Ultimately, of course, for that we also definitely need to have also agreements with the GDSs, and you're moving out so fast. So while we still have discussion with commercials, I don't think we have that much disagreement on the path forward. Until that has happened, and it will still take some time, I think we will have parallel worlds. We prepared for that, so our teams are flexibly equipped with tooling that they can do both. And we have to hire a few guys also for that. But in the end, I think we will move completely new world, but it will take, it will take time. So, so there's not only the question of the, the end-to-end access, technological access, not only the question of the content, how to fill the shelf, but there's also an industry political question about it, and that's definitely the discussion about how is the cake distributed and who gets what profit share according to the service that he gives to the customer. And I think that discussion is ongoing. The cake is growing, but also the pies will look different, I think, in the end. And that's also the discussion we, we always tend to like kind of keep as the elephant in the room, but it's there and something we have to solve together. And I think we're on a good way that in a reasonable timeframe we can do that as well.

Ian Heywood:Sure. Going back, because you've got a— you head up the distribution, so your revenue management, managing, you know, the, the 2 different ways, is, is that, is that really difficult? Is it complex? Is it, as you say, you're going to bring in some new skill sets? Can you retrain someone that has been used to, you know, distributing with 26 fare buckets to then going You know, it's infinite, you know.

Tamur Goudarzi Pour:Yeah, it's—

Ian Heywood:how do they do that? Is it—

Tamur Goudarzi Pour:It definitely needs new skills. I mean, we have people where we believe they can very well do that, and we're training them. We need to also get some new people. We're also hiring people, as you said, from retailing, not necessarily from the airline industry, for the ancillary questions. And here we're talking very much more toward flight and fare-related, less so the non-flight, less so the parking lot But still in the traditional field of near to the actual flight experience. And people there who come with experience from retailing, I think, help us a lot. So we're looking at a lot of cross-industry topics and not necessarily hiring only talent from the industry, but it's, it's quite a mountain still to climb. And I think we got a good team, and I think with the multi-hub structure where we have in the Lufthansa Group, where we not only resourcing in one place, we also have an advantage there.

Ian Heywood:Okay, let's see. And I've begged everyone to give me Slido questions. Let's start taking some of those. So what do you think is the— this question comes up quite a lot on panels recently. What's the biggest myth about NDC?

Tamur Goudarzi Pour:I think the biggest myth is that it's not there. Because, you know, just the numbers. I mean, we just, you know, the IATA may be the target for the leaderboard and I'm also changing the leaderboard there for the IATA recently. We have set now ourselves even a higher target for, for 2022. But for 2020, we said that we want to reach 20% of indirect sales via the new NDC distribution standard. I can tell you that we, for example, for Swiss October, we reached 24% already, and this target was end of '20. So mass adoption is happening. It's already there. And it's coming. I think all the 17 airlines of the leaderboard committed to that for end of 2020. So 20% of indirect sales, and we will set a much higher target for 2022. I think it's happening. As I said, where it's not yet happening, that's on the corporate side for various reasons. And that's, that's another chapter to discuss about. I think we can spend another hour.

Ian Heywood:There's always more complexity when you're into a TMC and corporate. So you're— I said this on stage, you're all sticks. Are you going to soften and be nice and have some Carrots for everyone?

Tamur Goudarzi Pour:There's an African saying, it says, if you want to get fast, go alone. If you want to get far, go together. And I think while the first phase of that industry-changing momentum has been probably on the fast track, now I think it's very important that we do it together. So we have to find, we have to find a way that we agree with all the big players in the industry. Be it you, be the other players. I think it's going to be not a world without GDSs, if that was maybe somebody assuming. I think it's going to be a world where we'll be together, so we're in the same boat. And in the aquarium, the fish always meet a couple of times.

Ian Heywood:Good. I like that answer.

Tamur Goudarzi Pour:That's good.

Ian Heywood:Why are some airlines not convinced about NDC? You do a lot on the IATA panels and that, don't you? So why do you think not everyone's come along? Let me broaden that. What I would say is there's an answer technically for large airlines such as yourself. Is there a solution at the moment for tier 2, tier 3 airlines?

Tamur Goudarzi Pour:I think it's a very good question. I think while we have probably different resources, not everybody has that. There will be definitely different speeds. I think being an aggregator here and make a great offering and service but a service that is— that you actually charge for in the right value chain. I think that is a big advantage that the GDSs have, and I think you can play here a big role for the smaller carriers who are not having that same technological abilities. We definitely have to take care of that, that this is also happening. And while there are also new players coming, I think some of the carriers directly go to the new players. If you look at players like TripActions, TravelPerk, They do full end-to-end corporate, full end-to-end corporate value chain management from duty of care to call centers of everything. Of course, you can connect directly to them. Yeah, so you have to have a multi-sourcing option. That's the thing. That's the trick and the investment. If you don't willing to do that, then I think aggregation with traditional players can also be a very good alternative. And we have to do it together. So we have to take care for also the ones that will be not so quick. And, and I think you will see different speeds for sure for a number of years to come.

Ian Heywood:You've mentioned a bit about agents and corporates, but are you seeing them coming on board more now?

Tamur Goudarzi Pour:Well, it's—

Ian Heywood:Softening?

Tamur Goudarzi Pour:Yeah, the big elephant is still in the room. It's also who pays to whom what. So that's something we still have to solve, and that's in the triangular relationship between GDSs, TMCs, and us. It's still a discussion. What is good that we have started, or we restarted the discussion, intensified them by, for example, in IATA we have now the various interest groups being represented, the GDSs. We have the GTAC, which is the TMC representation, and the leaderboard of the airlines. And we have started discussion, what are the technological impediments still there? There's a list when you look at NEC at scale for business. There's a list also from the TMCs that that they gave us and said, these points we think need to be fulfilled in order to have a smooth technological transition. I think that's something we're jointly working on now, and that's very good. There's an active discussion on that on an industry basis and not each airline with each player, which is also happening, but we need to have some of the weight going together now. That still remains a topic, but we also need to solve the financials.

Ian Heywood:Are you working in detail with some corporates that are going, right, you know, we've had all of this hype, you know, can we now prove it? Some that are, you know, coming along in a positive way that they're going like, right, can we test this? Because we're being asked this, you know, with some corps. They're going, are we able to now test this? Airline X says, you know, they can put out corporate offers for me, they can make them more personalized, they'd be better, they'd be better for me. Can we now trial this?

Tamur Goudarzi Pour:Yep. We do that. We do this with all GDSs. I mean, we have with every GDS, we have a trial running. We don't have yet agreements about the future, but we are doing these trials. I think everybody's wise to do that, particularly when the industry standard has not been fully established yet for the corporates. I think that's the way to go. And really, but we have to add it with an industry initiative that we can make it also an industry standard. when we talk about NEC for corporates.

Ian Heywood:I think you've answered the one about the GDSs. So, right, I don't know, this is a— this is in court at the moment. So do you want to say anything about Farelogix or not? Farelogix is your provider, I should say. That's, that's public knowledge. So they're your fare— they're your provider. The new ownership that's being, you know, questioned in court is— do you want to say anything about that or do you want to not?

Tamur Goudarzi Pour:Actually, you have to ask Sabre about not Not really us. And we have a— we have an agreement with Ferlogix, which works very well. And I'm really— I think they're really one of the industry leaders, I think, in terms of new technology, in terms of disruption of the industry in a positive sense. I think we really admire them. We have a very close relationship. I do not see that being changed with whatever comes out of that current merger process or the purchasing of Ferlogix process. It's still in the courts, so I can't really discuss it, and so I think it's something you have to ask Sabre. I don't think that they will say much more than that.

Ian Heywood:Perhaps it's a topic for next year. You've already said about the 2020, you're confident you're going to make your 20%?

Tamur Goudarzi Pour:Yeah, for sure.

Ian Heywood:Let me talk about the rest. I think, well, there's been a softening of the attitude, and that is we're going to work towards it. And I actually believe that's not a bad thing. I don't think this hard target, if, if it's achieved or it isn't achieved, is it, uh, you know, a success or a failure. I've always been a big supporter of the 20% target because it's given the industry something to focus on. I've also said if you can hit 20%, then there's no reason you can't hit 40, 50, 60%. So it is a meaningful number. What we are seeing is the airlines moving towards that. You're also seeing a slight change, as we were saying, we're much closer in our viewpoint now, and that is that it's important to get there together. It's important to get there with the right technology, and if that means you're going to be a quarter late or something like that, well, that still has to happen. The other thing is, is As I try to demonstrate without boring everyone, the devil is in the detail in NDC. And so when you scrape down to the level, we have roadmaps and we go, we're, you know, we're live with Qantas, for example. We're also live with these guys, but we're live with Qantas. But what does live mean? You know, and then you go, well, can you do this functionality? Can you do— well, and we have 2 things. You have the airline coming in and does the airline fare logics or whoever their technology provider is.

Tamur Goudarzi Pour:Yeah.

Ian Heywood:have that capability. And then we have to build it into our points of sale, either our API that then an OTA or big TMC takes. They then have to develop against that, or it's within SmartPoint, our desktop solution. And our competitors are in a similar situation. So, you know, they— when you say you're live, it's, it's then, you know, you start asking— you need to ask a couple of questions. What does that really mean? What I would say is by about the first quarter of next year when we're saying you're live, you're going to be a lot more capable. You're going to have the capabilities to do the those sales capabilities that the airlines want to do. You will be able to do it. Qantas talked publicly about being able to personalize on a frequent flyer number. That will be possible from the first quarter of next year and and things like that. And the stuff that Lufthansa's been talking about, that again will be possible. So there's live, there's testing, and then there's at scale. Are you worried? Because you know how many hits GDSs take.

Tamur Goudarzi Pour:Mm-hmm.

Ian Heywood:And we always stand up here and go like, you know, hey, we're big and we can do all of these and we got, you know, these enormous data centers around the world. That responsibility is coming onto you. That capability's coming onto you as the airline. So are you concerned about being able to take all of the hits that the, particularly OTAs and everyone will be? And the corporates are also saying they don't trust you when you personalize. So they're going to do an anonymous search and a personalized search to start with. I think if you prove them over time, then they will stop that. But that will increase the traffic to your web, to your site.

Tamur Goudarzi Pour:Well, not necessarily the site. As I said, we go omnichannel, so we will have distribution channels available. I think it's very important that we are transparent in what we do. When I say, for example, continuous pricing, you will be able to compare it with the traditional pricing in the traditional GDS, so you will immediately see that this is a good offer. I think that creates trust. I'm not scared at all. I think we, we took a lot of bullets already, so we are kind of battle-proven, but we will not deviate. And I think this is a very clear path that we have Gone. We have never retracted. We have never changed course, and I think we're very clear with our strategy. Partnership is very important. We have now three and a half thousand partners, seventy technology providers. It's not just a few guys that we connected. Yeah, and and just look at examples which are there. I mean, I'm not making advertising for some TMC, but look at on the on the website of TripActions. Go there and see it, and see what customer experience. you can see there. And in the end, that was the main idea of it. Of course, it's about economics, but the main idea is you need to hit the— what the industry— what the customer really wants. And if it's customer-friendly, in the end, that will win. And I think that customer centricity is the driving force for all of us. It should be. And otherwise, we will just disappear. And so I think that should be our common rallying around point, and not some other points of saying this or that is not there, which is the case, but we have to work on that.

Ian Heywood:But one of the dilemmas is at the moment we do a whole load of caching, but if you want to personalize, you can't cache. And so have you guys thought through that, or you're just like, we've got to work a way around this? I always talk about this sort of, you know, intelligent cache where you could let through what you want let through and not what you don't, but I I don't know whether that would even be possible to be able to be built, but—

Tamur Goudarzi Pour:Yeah, I think also the question would go back, what do you do to allow in the future technological standard that gives the personalization option? So I think the GDS really have to also think about that. We see this live in other new industry segments, so I think it will have to be one technology feature that is happening also as a change process with the GDSs. I think, I think that's something that's really important. And we are signed, we are live with Egencia, we're live with Expedia, we're live with many other players. That's happening there. Yeah, so I can only reiterate that the thing is there.

Ian Heywood:I think on blockchain, I would just say we haven't delivered APIs yet. So moving on to— I think the technology will move on, of course. Of course it will. Whether it is the blockchain or not, I don't know, but that won't be for the next couple of years. I think we need to ground what we've got to start with, and then— but, you know, it is ironic that we are talking about NDC as being new technology and APIs have been around for numbers of years. Let's pick— Let's pick one last question because we're just running out of time. Of the very important role of JVs over the Atlantic, how does NDC tackle CS or even JVs? I'm not sure what CS is. Code share. Oh, thank you. Code share is easy. JVs are different.

Tamur Goudarzi Pour:Yeah, yeah, I think that's a good question actually. I think we still have some way to go to harmonize also along the JVs, and it's also due partly to the fact that the industry political development in North America, when you look at that JV for, for as an example, has been different than in Europe. So, and for that also the drive today to do change in industry has been different, pricing has been different, and we are aligning, for example, very closely with our partners at Canada and United on that. I think we still have some way to go, going exactly the same way to harmonize and make it easy for the customer. So I would expect that for the time being, while you're on one GV, let's say geography, you will have for various point-of-sale east and westbound on the transatlantic slightly different regimes on that. That's simply given the different histories of the 2 geographic areas. So I think that there's still something we need to tackle and we need to solve, we need to get better at.

Ian Heywood:Yeah, there's more to go. I apologize yet again. I've never ever been able to get through all of the, uh, the questions, but I think we've, we've answered a lot. I hope the session's been, uh, very useful to you, and I really appreciate, Tamur, you coming along and the honesty and the openness that you've given to the audience. So thank you very much.

Tamur Goudarzi Pour:Thanks, Ian. Thank you. Thank you.

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