Skyscanner Seeing Lots Of Airline Interest In Its Direct Booking Platform

Transcript

Hugh Aitken:The Avianca deal, they're coming onto our direct booking platform, is really important for us on a couple of levels. One, it's our first agreement we have with an airline in Latin America to come onto direct booking, so it's great that we've now got airlines in Latin America coming on board and joining the many other airlines who are live in direct booking. Secondly, it's using NDC, which itself we're a huge supporter of, and using the standards that IATA have set on under NDC. But thirdly, and actually most importantly of all, it's just making it easier for travelers. So our whole idea behind direct booking and using NDC to enable it is to make it easier for travelers to search and then book for travel. So more importantly of all, and the key win for us and Avianca, is that travelers are making it easier to find and then book travel using Direct Connection. Yet more agreements coming in place? Absolutely. We're speaking to a large number of airlines at the moment. You know, we've got airlines such as Finnair, Cathay Pacific, Singapore Airlines on board, and we're seeing lots more interest from airlines just to come on board. One of the challenges is more around the time taken to build the technical capability on their side to connect. But, you know, IATA give that standard in NDC, and there's more and more adoption of it either through GDSs or direct connects with us. The storefront's a really interesting concept for us. So it firstly recognizes that the airline's brand is important for them. Airlines want to see their brand expressed on their site but also off their site. So the storefront is an attempt to make it a highly branded airline experience. So we retail what they want to have retailed on the shopfront and on direct booking. We show the fact that they've just refitted cabins and spent many millions of hundreds of dollars doing that, and that's what's really important with shopfronts. And also it just gives better information to travelers so they can make a more informed decision about who they are going to fly with and what the experience is going to be and what else is on offer with that airline or in that destination. It's probably the same as some airlines move at faster paces with everything. There's airlines who are very technology savvy and who grasp new concepts and who want to be that first mover with new concepts, versus others who will follow and learn from what others have done. And we see that across, you know, the newer technology, be it chatbots. I think chatbots is really interesting because I think if you look at what airlines are using chatbots for, a lot of it is operational, a lot of it is customer service on the day. Is my flight on time? Which gate does my flight depart from? And that sort of thing is— that very transactional data is brilliant with chatbots. And building out from that, the challenge for us is, and with airlines, is how does it become much more conversational and freely conversational so it's not just It's not just an interaction that I post a question and half an hour later I get a computer-processed answer which might not fit my exact requirements. So I think there's also how technology is keeping up to actually the demands of what travelers actually wanted to do with conversational services. Yeah, I think the industry is moving faster generally. You know, it's interesting at the CAPA event here, technology and disruption is talked about with types of new aircraft and new engine technology. So I think we talk about disruption very freely in aviation as it encompasses things that we, you know, Everything that touches aviation is being disrupted at the moment, be that aircraft engine technology or be that how you distribute. I think on the distribution side, which interests Skyscanner of course, is we see huge disruption coming because people are using technology differently. People are wanting different sorts of technology. We're living in a mobile world versus 5 years ago we were living in a desktop world, and that's only going to accelerate. If you look at China, payments and how people pay for things is hugely different to how we pay for it in Europe or in the Americas. That will start to come to us. So how do we keep relevant? How do we? How are we where the traveler is? Be that on Skyscanner, we hope, or be that on other sites. And how do we make sure that it's relevant and our brand shines through all of that?

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