FLYR Labs - Keynote Presentation

Transcript

Tiffany Sauquet:Well, thank you very much, CAPA. Thank you for inviting us. It's a pleasure. I'm from the south of France, and so when I heard this morning that we were very close to the mountains and the beach, well, it felt like home. So thank you. Thank you for this feeling. Thank you. After I graduated from college, well, I started my career in the south of France, and I worked at a major company in the travel industry. So some of you will probably recognize which company I'm talking about. Well, on my first day, one of my colleagues walked me through the challenges of airline content distribution and showed me the UI, also known as the cryptic green screen. So here I am typing cryptic commands like AN15JULNCECDG. SS1Y1NM1SOKE/Tiffany, et cetera. Learning about teletype, edifact, not exactly what I was expecting as a young graduate, I must say. And this was not in the '80s, right? I'm getting older, but not there yet. That was just before the étiquette à la main date, if you remember, in 2008. So jumping 15 years later, there has been obviously a lot of innovation in travel tech, but PNRs can still be booked using cryptic entries. E-tickets can still be issued in cryptic terminals. We're now hearing a lot about airline retailing transformation, and we heard a bit of this just earlier. MDC, one order, and the panel right after, as a matter of fact, I think will be touching on this topic. I was just attending IATA webinar last week about their airline retailing metrics index, and this is how IATA defines airline retailing using offers and orders: the ability to consistently sell and deliver to customers the products they want at the time they want in the way they want, either directly or via intermediaries. So why do we need to shift from P&Rs tickets, EMDs, to offers, orders, order items, et cetera? Is it because IATA is driving the conversation just like they did 15 years ago when they pushed the entire industry to move from paper tickets to e-tickets? Is it because current processes are too rigid? Well, probably a little bit of both and many more reasons, but the real reason for this transition is the customers. The travelers, people flying every day. Today's travelers are more dynamic than ever, and technological innovation will be the key to successfully address this transformation in a highly unpredictable environment. The world is changing. The way travelers are interacting with the world, with brands, is changing. Just think about how ChatGPT is revolutionizing everything we've been used to. Up to classrooms, how this technology is impacting even education. We live in a world where such tools are understandable in less than 20 seconds. And one thing that is common amongst all these brands, they're all founded on data, 100%, and they're all based on advanced AI capabilities to personalize and anticipate customer needs to drive adoption and usage. So speaking about AI, Let's look at the opportunity. This is a McKinsey study from a couple years ago, and it's quite amazing to see that they believe advanced AI and machine learning can represent half a trillion dollars of opportunity in the travel industry. About 90% of this opportunity was identified coming from use cases in marketing and sales, like AI-driven pricing and promotions, improving forecasting, automating customer service, And actually a large part of it is coming from identifying the right offer to be proposed to customers. Research shows that too many choices can be overwhelming. People going to a restaurant, for example, with many options are more inclined to have a less positive experience than people going to restaurants with a more limited menu. And I'm French, so I can tell you that if you go to a restaurant and you have limited choices, it's usually a good sign that you're gonna have a quality meal. It's not always the case, but it's usually a good sign. The same applies when people shop for flights, for holidays, packages. They can be exposed to like 50 different flight options, different fare families, a wide range of ancillaries, even hotels, cars, insurances, and so on and so forth. All this throughout the booking flow. Often we have to go through many different clicks and steps to simply book a flight. But we also know that too many steps in the booking flow significantly increases the chances that the customer is going to drop off. Offers have to be relevant, smart, descriptive, and they need to be relevant for every touchpoint with the customer. Personally, something I, I that really annoys me is when I'm traveling long haul for business and if luckily I'm traveling business class, it's arriving at the airport, at the connecting airport for like a 5, 6 hour connection and just discovering there that there is actually no lounge. Understanding the product you buy as a customer is key for a successful customer experience. Relevance, personalization, making people feel special, All this drives loyalty ultimately, and every single touchpoint with the customer is an opportunity of making this experience right. How we retail products, how we present those products to the customers, this needs to evolve. So what does it mean thinking like a retailer? It's not only about having the technology standards to be able to distribute content like NDC, it's also knowing what you want to sell to whom, when, how, et cetera. These old-school rule-based segmentation techniques like business versus leisure, advanced purchase, et cetera, they're still widely used when the world has changed and the volume of data at our fingertips is completely different to what it used to be 15 to 20 years ago. The travelers are giving all information needed from shopping information, loyalty information, even food preferences. On top of that, there's a wide range of system data that is available and also external data that, that can be used. And it's our task to use this data at its best and use it to power commercial decisions just like modern retailers do. That's what we're building at FLYR with our commercial operating system. We're convinced that AI and machine learning are the most efficient way to ensure data is interpreted and used correctly. So that's why our solutions are powered by different machine learning models from forecasting, pricing, to customer segmentation. Some of you may know, may have heard about FLYR as a company doing revenue management. Well, we're extending that to a much broader scope of solutions, including offer and order management to help airlines break away from 30 to 40 years legacy technology. So what's the formula to transition to a world of offers and orders and be successful in this journey? Number 1, understand your customer better. Travelers by their behavior are providing almost all the data. You need to think about how you're making an optimal use of this data, and AI and machine learning can really be key in this process. Number 2, full end-to-end offer optimization, tailoring offers for every shopping request. This is only possible with systems fully integrated that are no longer relying on outdated processes and segmentation. And those systems need to have underlying data that is common across all those systems. The key building, the key building blocks for successful transitions are gonna be the data and proper data warehousing in the background. Next generation total revenue management, looking at the passenger revenue from a holistic perspective and data-driven offer management and order management systems. And number 3, each airline is unique as you very well know. Work with partners who will tailor the transition to your needs. The transition to order management can seem scary, but it can be done in incremental steps. Start by getting the full picture of all the impacted systems. Then you can start synchronizing your PNRs with your orders. Once you have this figured out, you can start progressively transitioning channel after channel, application after application to the pace that that suits you. And don't forget the business transformation. This is going to be key throughout the process because it's not just a system change. This is also going to change the way of working. So as you think about this journey, I encourage you to think about the processes involved when you're engaging with your customers and ask yourself if you're putting the data you have access to to its optimal use. Is your current technology stack and processes allowing you to interact with your customers the way you want? Are the vendors you're working with facilitating this enablement? So I'll be around during this event, so don't hesitate to come to us, uh, uh, me and my colleagues during lunch breaks, uh, evening with a, a glass of wine. It'll be a pleasure to discuss and share a bit more how we are helping our customers, uh, embrace AI and use the latest technologies in this journey. Thank you very much.

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