Opportunities Arising From Technology In Distribution And Payments

Transcript

Bobby Healy:So today I spoke about Google and their position in the travel chain and how they can affect airlines going forward and the threat that that poses for airlines. But I'd also like to talk about the opportunity that technology presents airlines. And we're at the start now of a big shift in— a big shift, a big opportunity for airlines to take advantage of what we call conversational commerce. What is conversational commerce? To use AI, to use natural language, and to understand consumers in a text perspective, to sell to them, to support them, and to take over channels that currently don't exist. So if you look in China, for example, WeChat, so many transactions and payments happen on a text interface that users love. The entire country, in fact, operates on mobile devices, and that's a channel that an airline could look at and say, you know, we could actually transact, we could talk to our consumers. It's a digital channel, it's a fully automated channel, so it's a low-cost channel to operate, and it's a channel that's not affected by the cost of advertising, it's not affected by the monopoly in search that's there. Simply put, the airline, all they have to do is get the technology know-how to participate in that channel, and they have a fantastic opportunity to, as a sales channel, both as a sales channel, but also in the shorter term, to take advantage of it for better customer servicing, more responsive customer serving, and a reduced cost of servicing their customers. So there's win all over the place for airlines here. With a rather small investment actually. There's many companies that are doing it that they could outsource to, or they could do it in-house. And we already see a number of airlines that are doing it in-house, and we see it like KLM, for example, and we see great companies like Skyscanner, like my own company CarTrawler, that are doing loads with AI to reduce our own costs. So terrific opportunity. So, you know, after doing a slight bit of a Google bash there, if I look forward, it's not all that bad, and I think airlines is a great opportunity. So I think the airline for me that invests the most and that has the most nimble digital team, and you might be surprised to hear this, but it's actually our very own neighbor Ryanair. If you look at the size of their digital team, how adept they are at implementing and engineering a complete transformation of their digital, and if you look at their actual channel, the penetration on mobile that they have now, over 20% of their flights are sold on mobile. So not to overdo it, but they're the ones that have started with the least and now are probably ahead of most companies in that area. Not on the bleeding edge, so you look at companies like KLM and they've got a lot of bleeding edge stuff around the edges, you know, like their Alexa stuff, all sorts of things that they're doing. But I would think, for me anyway, certainly in Europe, I'd have to give the prize probably to Ryanair simply because they've thrown out all the old stuff and redone it again. It's not to say that any airline couldn't do it with the right investment. It's actually— I'd love to say it's difficult. It's not difficult to do. It's really easy to implement AI to reduce costs. Really is, you know. But to translate that into an effective and scalable channel where you can really bring customers in and really save costs, you actually have to have a proper plan to go to market with it and to change consumer behavior. And airlines find that really difficult to do.

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