NDC that shows you the money

Transcript

Damian Hickey:Guten Morgen. Good morning. You still with us? Yeah, thank you for staying with us. The good news is you're on the final stretch of the day. The other good news is I'm only going to take 7 minutes of your time. For those of you who don't know me or don't know Travelport, Travelport is the trusted travel marketplace, a marketplace that connects buyers and sellers of travel. How do we do that? We do that through our powerhouse of diverse content, travel content in our platform delivered through what we think is a great customer experience, whether that's through our technology, or through the support that our people deliver. I have the privilege within Travelport for managing the suppliers of that content across air, car, hotel, rail, cruise, any of that, that, that content for travel. And it's been great over the last few days to see many of our airline partners in particular here at this event. I feel like It's great to be back on the CAPA stage, although I do feel like I've been talking about NDC, so-called New Distribution Capability, which after 13 years is far from new, for over a decade. In fact, I look back at CAPA Berlin 2018 when I did a presentation about how transformational NDC will be in terms of the distribution and the retailing of travel. But one of the realizations is that in every transformational story, there comes a moment where a simple universal question has to cut through all the noise, which is, show me the money, right? Whether you're an airline or an agent or an aggregator, That question today is louder than it's ever been. We have invested millions, tens of millions of dollars on NDC, on modern airline retailing, on new APIs, on new workflows. But investment isn't the same as return. NDC was built on a promise of it was going to unlock richer offers for our travelers. It was going to facilitate easier servicing. It was going to deliver— well, at least if you believe reports from McKinsey, it was going to deliver measurable incremental revenue. But our belief is, in order to achieve that return on investment, that we as an industry, we need to have the courage to actually move beyond where we are today And we have to simplify, we have to unify, and we have to modernize— that's hard to say— modernize our technology and our platforms going forward. So here's the return on investment problem that I think nobody wants to say out loud in this industry. NDC has absorbed years of investment. Right. But many are still asking, where's the payoff? Okay. Each airline has implemented NDC differently. They have unique integrations through different APIs and schemas and standards. They have different rules around how you service. They have different workflows. They have different— there are many, many workarounds in order to try and make this as seamless as possible. Right. So while NDC was meant to simplify, it's just got a lot more complicated. All these different workflows, different ways of servicing. It's created a huge level of fragmentation of content, many different models out there. Each layer of complexity, in reality, it's a tax. It's a tax on margin. It's a tax on efficiency. It's a tax on scalability. And really our belief is return on investment, it cannot exist in that level of complexity and chaos. Fragmentation. Fragmentation is where money goes to die, right? It is the real killer of unlocking modern retail travel economics. When every airline's NDC looks and feels different, it forces agents into multiple ways of operating, right? Creating incredible inefficiencies. Right. They have to relearn workflows that slows down generation of revenue. It creates servicing gaps which leaks that precious revenue that they've been able to create. Right. And this inconsistent behavior by the agent on behalf of their travelers, their customers, erodes confidence, right? It destroys trust, right? And ultimately that destroys loyalty for those travelers coming back to the agents and ultimately coming back to the suppliers of that travel content. So to us, NDC without that unification, it just becomes a cost center. It's never going to be that profit center that it has promised to be, that we're all seeking for. So this complexity, it doesn't scale. Complexity doesn't monetize. And as I said on the first slide, it certainly doesn't show you the money. Now, this is not all gloom and doom, right? How do we navigate through this? How do we— what is the breakthrough here? Our belief is that normalization can become that economic engine to unlock profitability and generate that return on investment. All right. So if fragmentation of content kills return on investment, we believe that if we can normalize, that is going to give us the ability to unlock that return on investment. So a normalization engine can standardize schemas, can standardize workflows, can make sure that all the agents are working in the same way no matter what content that they are providing to their travelers, to their customers. So that normalization will allow faster bookings, fewer errors, better servicing, and it provides that opportunity to give that opportunity to upsell and cross-sell and create that retailing experience that ultimately NDC was built on in terms of its foundation. So it can turn NDC from being just a technology experiment in terms of connecting APIs into a true business model that can create this choice that ultimately is the goal for modern retailing without this chaos that we've created through this level of complexity. So what is this magic formula to create profit? It's really very simple. One workflow, all content. Agencies will earn both on their behalf and behalf of their suppliers across air, car, hotel if they get all of their content all side by side so they can service it in the same way, in the same workflow. They can see the revenue, they can see the commissions they earn, and they can turn that into profit for both them and their suppliers. Don't get me wrong, Agents want NDC. They want those personalized better offers, but they want them side by side with traditional content so that they can provide choice to their travelers. That ensures that they create that level of trust. If they don't have that trust, then you have that fragmentation where travelers will go to multiple different locations to try and find the same content. It's any wonder that airlines are concerned about high look-to-book ratios when they end up sending travelers to multiple different locations to get content and they get the same request from 2, 3, 4, 5 different locations all looking for the same thing, right? Because there isn't that trust that you can normalize the content, you can defragment it, unify it in one location. So we believe that you can create this profitability through this unification, through this better workflow, through this better servicing. So this ROI can come from simplicity, not just by giving access to more content. So I'd like to paraphrase a quote I heard recently from American Express Global Business Travel that many of you will know as a large corporate TMC. Blending innovation with operational excellence across all content is the key to savings, revenue generation, and superior experience. Innovation cannot pay unless it's unified. Content cannot pay unless it's normalized. And NDC certainly cannot pay unless it's really modernized, delivering that modern travel retailing experience. So as an industry, our ask is that we need to have the courage. We need to have the courage so that we can simplify, so we can unify, and we can modernize that. And that, we believe, is absolutely essential to create that return on investment. So NDC works best when it's seamless. It's seamless for the agent, it's seamless for the traveler. They don't want to care what's behind it in terms of technology. They just want to make sure that they have the best choice and they can have it as efficiently as possible. Right. At Travelport, we're making that happen. Right. We spent the last decade proving the model. We moved from technology pilots into real retail-ready, you know, platforms that can scale. You add to that future-proof technology, bringing in AI to ensure that you've got a high-performing, efficient platform. And that really builds for today's retailing experience, but more importantly, for tomorrow's profitability. So this is how we believe return on investment becomes a real outcome, right? Not just a hope for the future. All right. We really do believe that this is how NDC that shows you the money really finally does have an answer. So if you want to learn a little bit more about our findings, please look at the report, download it from our website. Give you some more insight. But in the meantime, thank you for your attention and look forward that you're having a great rest of the conference. So thank you very much, everybody.

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