Innovation driving the entire aviation ecosystem

Transcript

Dieter Westermann:Thank you much, everybody.

Hugh Aitken:Right, last panel. We've got to get this exciting from the start. So I'll start with you, Dieter.

Dieter Westermann:Right.

Hugh Aitken:I'd be interested in your take. You know, you come from an airline environment. You've been airlines pretty much, you know, your whole career. I'd be interested to get your perspective on innovation in Etihad.

Dieter Westermann:Yeah.

Hugh Aitken:Where it's at, what's driving it, what are the successes or otherwise that you've seen in Etihad recently?

Dieter Westermann:All right, well, let's start with the need for innovation. I think in one of the panels there was a discussion about profit margins of airlines are not very big, and that need creates a need for innovation. We have to be as innovative as we can to make sure that our profit margins are at least in an area that that is sustainable. And there are a lot of opportunities out there in which we can do a better job than today, in particular in the distribution environment. In Etihad especially, we know we have to be better and get better at innovation. Our group CEO is also a very strong supporter of innovation. Mm-hmm. Created some kind of like an innovation culture. We try to create that by having innovation committee that has been run by the group CEO. And out of that comes things like hackathons that we throw out, and we ask people to come up with some certain things inside of a theme. And then we pick one or two of the best ones and give them a few dollars, $10,000, whatever it is, small amount to develop it further and then present. We do sessions with the staff on a regular basis, innovation session, where we invite external speakers, speakers from other industries sometimes, or related industries where we believe they are very innovative. We do a 1-hour, we invite openly every staff in that thing, and we do it like a lunch break, innovation lunch break session, and so forth. So there is I think in our company, the very clear understanding that innovation is required and innovation must come from within the organization.

Hugh Aitken:And so how is that translated in the world of revenue management? What examples have you got of something that has been innovative that's driven ultimately bottom-line improvement?

Dieter Westermann:Yeah, so I was sitting in the other session when we were talking about NDC that enables to show something at the front end. What we of course do in revenue management is come up with smarter logics to manage the back end, and that is primarily in the area of either pricing, dynamic pricing, price elasticity, or trying to come up with some logic of how I best bundle. Should I create a bundle or should I do à la carte? If I do à la carte, which items are probably the best one? that the consumer would like to get, and all these kind of things. This is a very wide field of where you can come up with innovation in the future. And we work on, on this with the internal revenue management team and try to come up with some ideas and roll them out.

Hugh Aitken:Yeah. And, and you talked about you often get external speakers in. Is there one that you look at that's really struck you as, wow, what they said or what they're doing or The thing, the thought that they made us, that really struck you or struck the team?

Dieter Westermann:Um, actually, that, that's a variety. It's not that you could name one individual because they're coming from totally different industries and some of them have a totally different background. We had the company, the Boom Company, there explaining why they built a supersonic plane.

Hugh Aitken:Yeah.

Dieter Westermann:And I asked myself why they're doing it. But nevertheless, this is an innovation that is going to be rolled out and requires quite some money. So I thought that was an interesting theme. We had Google there talking about what projects they do, which have nothing to do with what you think Google would do under the Alphabet thing. And that was also very, very interesting to see.

Dino Gelmetti:Good.

Hugh Aitken:So did you, did you order 5, 10, or 20 Boom aircraft? Almost.

Jonathan Newman:Almost.

Hugh Aitken:Excellent. It's the thought that counts. Jonathan, turning to yourself, you know, you've been in the airline side, you're now in the tech world. Building on what Dieter said, what are the kind of the differences? What have you observed as you've moved from one to the other and the learning? And maybe talk a bit about some of the stuff that Caravelo is thinking about and planning at the moment.

Jonathan Newman:Well, I was thinking about that earlier. I was fortunate to work for 2 very innovative and entrepreneurial airlines at the Etihad Group and prior to that in New Zealand. And what was clear at both of those and within the tech industry now when we talk to airlines around the world, what we see is the one defining factor that covers all really innovative airlines and it's that culture, as Dieter mentions.

Dieter Westermann:Yeah.

Jonathan Newman:It's that kind of spirit of both kind of fearlessness when it comes to challenging the status quo, but also just not sticking with the bureaucracy that ultimately stifles a lot of innovation. It's not just the preserve of low-cost carriers, although the low-cost carriers that not just that we work with, but that we see in the industry They have not just a need to innovate, but they also have a culture that because they're so, most of the time, so new, that they haven't built up a culture of bureaucracy that actually stifles things by putting in place layers of approvals or RFPs or other things, or they're just not tied to legacy—

Hugh Aitken:Yeah.

Jonathan Newman:To legacy processes. So over the last few years, as Caravelo's grown, we've worked with airlines around the world, whether it be LCCs, big full-service carriers as well. And what we've seen is that where airlines have got this culture of innovation, where it works, and then they bring in companies, whether it's like ourselves or others, to actually help them bring about that innovation to the fore. As a good example, Volaris in Mexico. And this also comes on to your point earlier, Hugh, about the Amazonization of travel. They came to us saying that they, they understood the concept of the Amazon of travel, but they wanted to do something different. They wanted to be the Spotify of travel. Why? Because they saw Amazon as being purely focused on transactions rather than on experience. And in the same way that whilst you might shop on Amazon, you'll also go to other retailers. If you've got a Spotify account, the likelihood is you don't have an Apple Music account.

Hugh Aitken:Mm-hmm.

Jonathan Newman:So there are lots of smart airlines that are, that are driving innovation, maybe because of the burning platform of competitive behavior, economic direction from, from, from their leadership. But ultimately it comes down to being able to do it, comes down to having a culture of people that can challenge that status quo.

Hugh Aitken:Yeah, absolutely. And I'm keen to go deeper on culture actually in a minute. One of the things that you're doing a lot on is chat and conversational services. What's your take on that at the moment and where that might go to help airlines and retailing or service delivery? It'd be interesting, your perspective on that.

Jonathan Newman:Yeah, so chat or conversational commerce, we've been doing that for the last 2 and a half years. It's about doing 2 things. Firstly, getting closer to customers, and secondly, being able to digitalize a lot of the high-touch, low-value transactional work that humans have been doing for so long. It's very hard as a customer service agent to change a booking 20, 30 times a day and continues to do it with a smile on their face. It's very hard to make sure that you've got 150 customer service agents that know the right answer to everything and can deliver it in the right, in the right way. So what we're doing with a number of airlines and travel brands is helping them to free up their human capital by digitalizing a lot of these high-touch low-value transactions and digitalizing the, um, the, the customer service experience, um, within, within common messenger platforms. Um, the results we've seen have been quite staggering.

Hugh Aitken:Mm-hmm.

Jonathan Newman:Um, it's been fantastic to see airlines that have really taken the concept to heart and positioned digital automated agent technology at the heart of their customer service they've been able to reduce the cost of their customer service operation really quite significantly. Same with retailing. So being able to retail in the post-sale environment, which is a lot of ways— which is where you start to get that Amazonization of the travel retailing experience in a post-sale environment. It's a really good channel for it, much better than by sending email after email.

Dino Gelmetti:Yeah.

Hugh Aitken:Yep, absolutely. Okay, we're gonna come back to retail in a bit more actually, 'cause I think it's a big theme about where do we go in that and some of the enablers. And we was conscious the NDC panel talked a lot about this as well, so we won't try and cover all the same ground. Dino, finishing with yourself, you're the one person who's been tech through their career. You're now with a GDS. How are you seeing the world of innovation in your world? changing, you know, how are you experiencing at the moment?

Dino Gelmetti:Yeah, the discussion earlier today around MDC is a real disruptor for the distribution industry. And, and more than that, we provide— we're also a service provider into the airline industry. So what we need to start to do is looking at how we can take the old world of legacy systems within the airline industry to this new retailing world that the airlines are looking to do. So for us, it's about how do we start bringing innovation into that environment to give flexibility to the airlines to be able to sell whatever products they want through whatever channel they want and price at the way they want as well. And, and with that, so we start talking about how do we package up our products And then how do you distribute them through the various channels? So if we start looking at personalization as an example, we are going to— the transaction volume that's going to increase by 5 to 10 to 100 times. So then it's a question of, do we have the infrastructure to be able to support that sort of scalability?

Dieter Westermann:Right.

Dino Gelmetti:So, and then the shopping experience. So if we start throwing out a whole bunch of personalized offers, Mm-hmm. How we're going to be able to return back a product in a timeframe that the consumer's going to go, yes, I want that and I'm going to buy it now. And then the airline also needs to put their brand experience around that because it's just not about offering a product, it's about a brand that they're trying to create as well. So as a service provider to the airline industry, those are all the contributing factors that we're trying to deal with.

Dieter Westermann:Mm-hmm.

Dino Gelmetti:But how can we build an agile, flexible, environment to give the airlines the power to be able to then sell and distribute products across all their channels in the way that they want.

Hugh Aitken:Yeah.

Dino Gelmetti:So, you know, we, we have actually developed a Sabre Innovation Lab, and we are looking at various technologies to see how we can do that. So one is, how do we take the old world into the new world? Because that's not going to happen overnight. But also, how do we give the flexibility and agility to the— to our airline customers that want to do NDC or the world-class retailing experience that they want to be able to offer to their customers? So our innovation labs are looking at a number of things. So if we look at personalization as an example, airlines don't know most of their customers that will come to their website.

Hugh Aitken:Yeah.

Dino Gelmetti:They're anonymous. So how do we customize an offer To an anonymous customer.

Hugh Aitken:Mm-hmm.

Dino Gelmetti:So we're looking at techniques like trip purpose segmentation. So we try and figure out, are they going on a business trip? Are they going on a holiday? Is it a romantic getaway? So based on, on those sort of segments, we start looking at what sort of attributes can we collect from these anonymous customers. And then with that, we're going to look at how can we offer a personalized offer that makes sense Mm-hmm. To them for the purpose of the trip. And then as we get to know them more and more, then we can be more specific about the offers that we'll provide. And if we embed artificial intelligence and machine learning into that, these routines will get smarter in their own right.

Hugh Aitken:Mm-hmm.

Dino Gelmetti:And then also complement that with rich data as well, and maybe looking at various sources of data that are not typical data sets that an airline will look today. but also enrich and look at how we can make those offers more relevant and personalized going forward. So, so our innovation labs are looking at all these various routines and technologies, and with the view that it's a fail-fast mentality, right? So we don't want to spend years figuring out how to solve these problems.

Hugh Aitken:Yeah.

Dino Gelmetti:We come up with a pilot, we test it out. If it works, we then take it on to to our development organization to do it, or we just throw it away and move on to the next topic. And the lab is also not in actually in our head office. It's actually built in Boston. We want to be close to universities like MIT. We've got Google people in there. We've got ex-Amazon people and airline people because we still need to have that industry knowledge to complement the new way of thinking perhaps from a technology point of view. And so, yeah, that's That's how we're looking at bringing innovation into the airline industry, because it's an interesting sort of transformation period that we're going through. But as I said at the beginning, we've got to still carry the old with the new. We can't just throw one out, and we've got to figure out how to solve that problem effectively.

Hugh Aitken:Yeah, I'd be interested in your perspective around how much innovation is driven by or hindered by the legacy that we have.

Dino Gelmetti:Dieter probably knows better than me.

Dieter Westermann:Maybe I would like to say something because we talked about what drives need for innovation, and Dino was making a comment about in this NDC world, I will be hit by 5,000 times more, whatever the volume is, messages, and do I have the infrastructure to cope with that? Yeah, but maybe that is not the answer. Maybe the answer is we have to rethink How we do the calculation? Because while I'm doing my request, I have this device. I put my request in. I send it to this infrastructure. While this sits idle, and the work is done there, is there an idea or a way where I can move just the routes over here and let the calculation be done on this device? That would spread it across the entire globe.

Dino Gelmetti:Yeah.

Dieter Westermann:And I'm just throwing this out. So I mean, this. This question is a need for innovation, right? And we have to rethink this and not just buy bigger boxes and see whether the airlines can afford it.

Dino Gelmetti:Yeah, absolutely, I agree. And, you know, we're looking at distributed architectures in the cloud to tackle that specifically, right? So we don't want to have— in the past, you had one data center and the system's running there, and then you just keep on throwing capacity and whatever else at it. to hope that it works. Whereas now, if we— if you start, you know, we're looking at re-architecting solutions and going down the microservices API path.

Jonathan Newman:Mm-hmm.

Dino Gelmetti:And the benefit of that is that we can start distributing, as you say, Dieter, parts of the application in different parts of the world. And, and so, and even from a capacity point of view, you build in some resilience into the, into the cloud infrastructure.

Dieter Westermann:Mm-hmm.

Dino Gelmetti:So then if something goes down, you can still flick it somewhere else. So So you're right, it's not just a matter of innovation from a— because you asked me about one of the limitations of the things we're facing in bringing innovation. There's a lot of legacy in the airline industry from a systems point of view, and we need to break that down to be able to be more effective, to allow us to innovate at the front end with the customer, right? Because you want a better customer experience, you want to be able to be a better retailer. But there are some limitations in the back office. So we need to look at not only what are the new solutions that we want to bring, what new innovation, or what are uber moments that we want to bring into the industry, but we also got to figure out how, how in the back we're going to be able to solve that problem as well from a technology point of view.

Hugh Aitken:Yeah, no, it always strikes me, looking slightly from the outside in, how utterly complex— the only thing that's more complex in travel is hotel distribution than air distribution. And how we're all dependent on other systems, and a lot of them are— some of them are still mainframe-driven. And that seems to be a real impediment, just this system. And, you know, your innovation lab, great, sounds great. Actually, is it making the progress and the pace of progress that you would want it? And, you know, Dieter, you would want somebody like Sabre as your supplier to be wanting to come to you with real innovation.

Dino Gelmetti:We're certainly on the journey to making it better. We're still We still have a lot of work to do.

Jonathan Newman:Yeah.

Dino Gelmetti:And I think a lot of competitive organizations to Sabre also have similar sort of challenges, right? So what we're looking at is we don't want to do open-heart surgery and change everything overnight because that's just going to be prohibitive from a timing point of view. It'll take a long time. It's very costly. So what we're looking at, what are the things that we can innovate now that give airline customers value whilst we're still trying to, you know, modernize the, the core of it all. Because eventually we need to modernize the whole lot to be able to move to this new API economy, right?

Dieter Westermann:Yeah.

Dino Gelmetti:So, so we're looking at what are the— so for example, our shopping now solution is completely in the cloud. It's out of our old data center. It doesn't run on a mainframe. It's fully operational in the cloud. So The reason why we're doing that, because we want it to be a faster experience and we want it to be on our new platform. And there's also, you know, when I talk about the customer segmentation piece, we want to be able to offer that in the shopping experience. So rather than saying I'm going from A to B, hey, I'm going on a holiday, on a business trip. So then we want to be able to say, well, hey, here are all the things that we think you would like to buy.

Jonathan Newman:Yeah.

Dino Gelmetti:Whether it be ancillaries, seat, wherever you want on the plane, etc. So, so we're looking at a journey of what are the things that we can move into the new world quickly that give our airline customers the most value. And we get— we do talk to our customers about what are the areas that they would like to see us to invest and grow in quickly. Good to hear. And then while we're doing all that in parallel, fixing the engine to make sure that we're going to be able to move into this new world, What's your perspective coming from a slightly different tech viewpoint on where airlines and aviation and Sabre all is at the moment?

Jonathan Newman:Well, coming from the scruffy startup world where it serves the airline industry and we have a certain dependence, let's say, on the host systems, on the legacy core, whether it's SAP or Oracle or Oracle ERP, it be Sabre or your competitors. The greatest bugbear that we have and that we confront almost on a daily basis is that— and it's great hearing Dino say this— but there's a bigger challenge behind the infrastructure, and that's also the commercials behind it as well.

Hugh Aitken:Right.

Jonathan Newman:That the legacy systems don't actually want scruffy startups like us kind of going in and sort of playing around with it. One, because it diminishes the hold that they have on their big airline customers. And secondly, that it's just not good for them, for their infrastructure long-term. So we have a kind of love-hate relationship with the PSS environment. You know, some are, you know, there's zero documentation available for developers that are providing services to airlines. airlines, even, you know, much bigger companies than us have, you know, zero kind of documentation to work with. And that's fine.

Dino Gelmetti:Yeah.

Jonathan Newman:But there's often a proactive hindrance, which is, again, partly driven by infrastructure, partly driven commercially, which is a big hindrance to innovation globally because It's not always an open playing field. And that's not sour grapes from a small company. But what it is, is a reflection of frustration of some of our airline customers and airlines that we talk to that say, you know, I would love to do this with you, but the moment I ask my PSS to open something up, There's going to be a representative from that PSS that comes into my office and says, don't do it with them. You need to be doing it with us. And that's a— so, I mean, which is vaguely anti-competitive, but it's also a reality.

Dino Gelmetti:Yeah.

Hugh Aitken:Interesting. Something that Jonathan brought out there, Dieter, is about the people being protectionists in aviation. There's not the developer documentation available. You know, one of the things at Skyscanner is we make available our documentation to everybody and anybody. And I just wonder, how much is the culture in airlines of ultra-competitiveness and not being as open? Or, you know, be interesting, is there a cultural challenge about letting people in? You know, that boy in the bedroom who's developed Facebook 20-odd years ago, would an airline have— no way are you going to come in and do something different in our backyard? Or do you think airlines embrace External thinking enough?

Dieter Westermann:I don't think it's the airline culture in that area that hinders that. I would say in what we have discussed so far, the airlines are hostage of their own success of 30 years ago. Yeah, right. We have established the first internet. We have a worldwide commercial internet where others were not even thinking of sending an email or anything. Everything was established in a way and then grown and grown and grown, and it still has to stitch together with all the stakeholders in that value chain, which are thousands and thousands. And to dismantle that right now is very difficult. That's— I think that, that is the challenge that we have to resolve. And that— well, I think what we try to resolve with NDC in one order— try— well, we'll see how that works, but we try to resolve this fundamental problem. When it comes to airlines talking about innovation, even between airlines, that has happened a lot, and particularly in the area of revenue management, for example.

Hugh Aitken:Yeah.

Dieter Westermann:We have these international meetings, we share everything, right? As long as it's not commercial, as long as it's inside of legal boundaries. So we don't, of course, share price or anything else, but conceptually we exchange ideas a lot in the industry, and that has always So I think the industry is an open-minded industry about innovation and even exchanging ideas. But we are stuck in that infrastructure that was great in the past, but then was never changed when it was time to throw it out and build new. And now we are— I think it's about time. We have to get rid of it.

Jonathan Newman:Yeah, I know.

Hugh Aitken:It always strikes me that aviation is still ruled by a rule set that was developed, what, 70 years ago? Chicago Convention? And I wonder how much that permeates everything in aviation, that we're still run by old rules and old systems. And, you know, how you unpick that is the real challenge.

Dieter Westermann:Yeah, and that is a big problem. Yes.

Hugh Aitken:Yeah, absolutely. And where do you think— changing slightly about airline retailing— where do you think that's going next? What do you think airlines need to do to really start to drive retailing and getting into that retail mindset?

Jonathan Newman:Gosh, well, I think NDC is a really, really good step forward. It's something that LCCs have embraced for quite a long time, whether it's the technology behind it, whether it's the fact that they have— it's been born out of necessity to retail more. Maybe it's because they're closer to their customers from day one. But the returning, the successful returning that we've seen is where airlines firstly understand their customers a bit better, to understand their markets, which is not something that necessarily is driven by technology. And then secondly, embrace some openness in ways of just experimenting. So actually being prepared to try new things.

Hugh Aitken:Yeah.

Jonathan Newman:If you look at some of the testing that goes on with airlines such as Viva Aerobus in Mexico, if you look at AirAsia and what they're doing on a daily basis, they have something phenomenal in terms of different tests that are going on in front of their customers, whether they know it or not. And the learning that comes from that is helping them to become better retailers.

Hugh Aitken:Yeah.

Jonathan Newman:Antonio Fernández has come out with recently.

Hugh Aitken:He has.

Jonathan Newman:Saying that, you know, they're becoming less of an airline and more of a retailing platform. So as an organization, not every airline is going to be able to mimic that, but I think most airlines need to look to the disruptors within the industry for that kind of inspiration more than looking to Amazon as an example.

Hugh Aitken:Yeah, absolutely. Do you see your perspective on that?

Dieter Westermann:I think we have a long way to go to become real good retailers. Yeah, and it requires a mindset change because what airlines tend to do is— and I see that also in my department— we tend to look at our own reports and we look at booking trends, and then we see it, and then we look at the market size and share, and then we make decisions. Yeah, so we sit in an ivory tower and Right, look at some Excel sheets and then think that we control the world. We have to get out to the consumer and figure out what the consumer wants and then respond to that. If you do that right, the curves will go up. We don't have to look at the Excel sheets in-house all the time. But that is embedded in, in many, many years of airline culture to do it this way.

Hugh Aitken:But how do you balance the internal— you need to look at the bottom line, which is a short-term relatively, with a long-term around actually being traveler-first or consumer-first might not be the most profitable short-term route to take. How do you balance those 2 things off?

Dieter Westermann:Well, of course, as we said, airlines' profit margins are not very big, so we have to be very careful when we practice things and try them out. But we do know that we have to try things out, and we are willing to invest in these things. And part of a very good innovation culture is to encourage people to fail, right? That doesn't mean make deliberate mistakes, but we know you cannot be right if you, you always do the right thing. You will never innovate, right? You never push the boundaries. So the culture must encourage people making mistakes or fail and then get up again and don't have to explain for years why that error happened or that mistake happened. Just move on.

Hugh Aitken:Absolutely.

Dieter Westermann:And that is a change of culture also in airlines, right?

Hugh Aitken:Yeah, I always— I remember a year or two ago in Skyscanner we had Fail Forward Awards, so we actually celebrated failure, which is an odd thing. It does seem an odd thing to do from a kind of a European European-centric or, you know, Western view. But actually, that— right, we learned more out of this than we learn out of some of our successes.

Dieter Westermann:And Alan, we of course have to be very careful that we keep it in the commercial and don't move that idea into the operational area, right?

Jonathan Newman:You have to— you have to not just ingrain it, you have to really ingrain it within the whole of the organization. The best example I can give is with LATAM, which is, you know, a very big very complex airline that's come together from, you know, from 2 big global airlines. They operate multiple models, multiple hubs. And whilst in the midst of everything that was going on on the merger between LAN and TAM, they brought together this SWAT team which was designed to— and it was designed to challenge the status quo. And it had almost carte blanche launch, to be able to go and try different things, to be able to push things forward with zero bureaucracy behind it.

Hugh Aitken:Yeah.

Jonathan Newman:And this team was, right from the outset, was told, you will not hear no from your supporting stakeholders. And what that drove was an incredible amount of innovation. We worked with them to develop and launch one product and a couple A couple of other startups did, uh, did the same. Um, ours is still going very strong, and it's now become a core part of what they do in, in revenue management. Um, but it— but without that ingrained approach of you will not hear no from your stakeholders, these kinds of things would not have happened.

Hugh Aitken:Yeah, no, absolutely. No, it's a really interesting culture change. Yeah. Um, you know, I'm going to switch on to Slido, so if you've not already, please put questions. I'll switch on to that in a Oh, we've got some. Excellent. And just your perspective on airline retailing, where it goes next. You know, what can airlines learn from others perhaps in that space?

Dino Gelmetti:I guess it all comes down to, I think, the willingness to change from doing things that we do today to a new model. And I think the learnings— I don't know, I think, I think the I think the learnings will come more from outside the industry than within when it comes to retailing because from a retailing point of view, the airlines, from the discussions we have, are looking for new ideas and new approaches to take to market.

Jonathan Newman:Mm-hmm.

Dino Gelmetti:So what we're working with our airline customers on is how do we create an environment to allow them to go and experiment and change, you know, maybe in a particular market, or maybe with a particular customer set, to try some of these new ideas from a retailing point of view, right? So for us, it's all about how do we break down the legacy thinking of the past in the way that we do things and provide an environment where you can go do the sandpitting, you can go, you know, fail fast in a particular market.

Hugh Aitken:Yeah.

Dino Gelmetti:And learn from that and evolve and grow your strategy from there. So, so, you know, looking at, you know, look at Amazon, you know, they started selling books and then they started cross-selling. I mean, 30% of Amazon's revenue come from cross-sell and upsell. So how do I create it? How do we support our airline customers in an environment where they can start coming up with different offers and models in how they can do that? So I think it's more about how do you learn from other industries? I mean, because the retailers, the The telcos, the retail financial organizations have been doing this for 10, 15 years, right?

Dieter Westermann:Mm-hmm.

Dino Gelmetti:And they had their challenges in the early days. They had legacy systems. They, you know, if you look at retail banking, they got into insurance, providing insurance services to their customers, and a whole bunch of other products, which are all disparate systems, disparate customer datasets, and they had to figure out, well, how do I bring that all together, and then through my channels make the same sort of offers to my customers? And then how do I segment my customers to figure out what sort of bundles I want to sell to them? So it's all about how do we break down the mentality of the past and perhaps some of the silos of our systems and the way that the organization operates, and then create an environment to allow them to go and grow and expand into the new world.

Hugh Aitken:Maybe we need to roll out the LATAM initiative to the whole of aviation. Throw everybody in a room for a couple of days and say, We'll see what happens. That'll be interesting to watch. I'll sell tickets. And okay, brilliant. Really, the first— what you just said really fits into that first question. Are there any— that's just dropped off the screen. Are there any airlines or things that you've seen recently, really best practice that you've perhaps noticed? Do you know any airline— great example from LATAM, for example— any that you've seen recently?

Dino Gelmetti:More ideas and thinking than actually good examples of it all. So I think it's I think it's more around, you know, some of our more traditional network carriers are looking at how to expand into ancillary sales, right? So they're looking at different models and approaches to how they can offer more products to their customers rather than just having it all in one bundle, right?

Hugh Aitken:So any great examples recently?

Dino Gelmetti:It's hard for me as a service provider to sort of give out Ideas about my customers. No, I actually can't.

Hugh Aitken:Right.

Dino Gelmetti:But, you know, but again, it's more about helping them go and experiment. And as I said, they look at particular markets. And, and so, you know, we've done also some things around dynamic pricing where, you know, we help because we get— we have a rich set of data around bookings around the globe. So So how do we work with some of our customers to say, well, in a particular market, for the same sort of sectors, your competitors are offering X amount of price. How do we then sort of look at, you know, your service offering, how it compares to that, and can we uplift the pricing for that particular sector, for that particular market? So that's seen some good changes again. So, but again, these are small, innovative sort of packages that we're starting to work with our customers on. And I think what NDC will do is start to bring all these various ideas together and then create that more, you know, world-class sort of retailing experience.

Hugh Aitken:Okay. All right. Thank you. I'm going to miss the next question. I don't know what hotels some of that person stays in. Fold down the corners of toilet paper. My God, that's innovative. Should we already be thinking beyond the millennial? Dieter, how do you in Etihad, how do you look at, say, segmentation of passengers and innovation and the need for innovation depending on the segments of passengers?

Dieter Westermann:Oh, different, different angles, very traditional angles, right? We use the standard segmentation based on collecting data that we have from the booking data. We collect data via questionnaire and ask people like this, and then we have come up with a data lab that tries to kind of like structure those particular booking data into customer segments and then tag them as a particular high value, low value, and so forth. And so the challenge with all this is, and then in the end, how can I use that information once I have it?

Hugh Aitken:Yeah.

Dieter Westermann:Then I'm stuck with it in my office. And again, we're repeating this again and again. I need some NDC connectivity that someone on the other side tells me, I'm a similar guy, and that's now I can give you a fitting answer.

Hugh Aitken:So. Yeah, no, interesting. Okay, I'm conscious of time. We could— that's a subject in itself for a panel.

Jonathan Newman:Can I go on to that, Hugh?

Dino Gelmetti:Yeah, go on.

Jonathan Newman:Beyond the millennial, and also this kind of comes back to seeing what other airlines have done internally, come back to Volaris. So Volaris are, for those that don't know, they're a super successful ultra-low-cost carrier in a fantastically competitive market in Mexico. And they came to us and said, we need to differentiate and we want to go look very differently in the way that we service our customers. Because if you were designing today a digital user experience, you would not do a from to outbound date, inbound date, input your credit card, receive a PNR ticket, whatever. You just wouldn't do it. And the customers that are coming up behind the millennial generation are customers that are looking at this kind of way of booking that their grandparents have been booking and going, this isn't how we want to experience purchasing travel. They're growing up with this discovery of products themselves, whether it be through Pinterest, as you mentioned, whether it be through Spotify. So why not actually offer them a way of engaging with your airline brand similar to that?

Hugh Aitken:Yeah.

Jonathan Newman:So that's why we launched— we built and launched the subscription product VPass for them. So now there are tens of thousands of customers that are subscribing and paying a recurring fee to an airline every single month for a certain amount of inventory. Now that's a way that, you know, customers kind of almost expect. I pay something every month, I get something every month. And it's a great way for that airline to differentiate itself, to be able to guarantee itself income, and to be able to continue to retail.

Dino Gelmetti:Yeah.

Jonathan Newman:So I think there is— and that's one example from one smart airline, but I think as we go beyond 2020, NDC being just one, one part of it. But smart airlines are going to go, regardless of what the plumbing and the pipes are behind, we have to address what— how does the customer want to experience what we do?

Hugh Aitken:Yeah, absolutely.

Jonathan Newman:And, and because that's not being, you know, addressed in discussions around NDC. I mean, that's something that airlines are, you know, need to be doing, you know, on their own and looking really carefully at what their market, what the next generations of customers, how they're going to want to experience their airline.

Hugh Aitken:Yeah, absolutely. It always strikes me a huge number of our travelers don't know where they want to go, so they type anywhere as the destination. Um, but when you're an airline site, you need to know— most people know where they're starting, but you know, there's no— inspirational is a very price-led message. There's a huge amount even in that. But we're over time, and I'm gonna— one more question out of these. How adoptive are passengers to developments and technology? One second on each. Are they really willing to trust and share with providers? Jonathan, start off.

Jonathan Newman:More than you think.

Hugh Aitken:Okay. Dino?

Dino Gelmetti:Yeah, I agree with that. I think it comes down to the trust of the brand as well, right? But I think passengers are more adoptive of technology than we believe.

Hugh Aitken:Okay.

Dieter Westermann:And I've missed the question, to be honest.

Hugh Aitken:So the question, how adaptive are passengers to developments in technology, are they really willing to trust and share with providers?

Dieter Westermann:Yeah, I think that they're generating changes to that.

Hugh Aitken:Yeah, I think— okay, on that note, we're over time. Thank you very much, panel. Appreciate it's late in the day. Thank you all for staying. And yes, Peter, over to yourself.

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