Turning Disruptions Into Customer Loyalty Moments with Uber for Business and Menzies Aviation

Transcript

Simon Elsegood:Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our panel. The focus of this is turning disruption into customer loyalty moments with Uber for Business and Menzies Aviation. The purpose of this discussion is to explore how the 2 businesses of our panellists are combining technology and their strategic partnership to sort of turn disruption management on its head a bit, with the intent of delivering operational savings for airlines and generally just trying to improve the passenger experience. So I'll start with a round of introductions, gentlemen.

Mark Brinkworth:Hello, I'm Mark Brinkworth, Senior Vice President for for Menzies in Oceania, Australia, New Zealand. Been with Menzies about 10 years, prior to that with EasyJet in the UK and then some time with Air New Zealand as well. So nice to meet you all.

Nicholas Trueman:Hi everyone, my name's Nicholas Truman. I'm the Passenger Services Manager for Menzies in Sydney. So I lead a team of around 350 providing passenger services for 13 international airlines. looking after around 130 to 150 wide-body flights a week. And part of our service offering is assisting our customer airlines during disruptions and cancellations, which is where this partnership with Uber sort of started.

Joshua Prendergast:Hi there, my name is Josh Prendergast. I work for Uber within the Uber for Business team. This role involves partnering with the largest organizations across Australia and New Zealand, understanding their travel and meals requirements, and then putting solutions in place through our business technologies to deliver results. This is the first time that we have attended this event and it's really good to be here. And the reasoning for it, it basically comes off the back of some really strong partnerships that we've formed with airlines and airports and other organizations across this sector. While creating these partnerships, we've been able to gain a deep understanding of the requirements across the sector and basically tailor our offerings accordingly. And basically what we've seen is common problems across the industry that our technologies can provide solutions to. Lack of visibility and control, whereby when transitioned to Uber, everything is tracked. You know, we can quantify the full experience and you can basically put program rules in place to manage how that ground travel is undertaken. Another one is basically removing manual administration and expense reconciliation and replacing that with technology, elevating the business traveler's riding experience. In this example with Menzies, your customers.

Mark Brinkworth:Yeah.

Joshua Prendergast:And that's something that we feel really privileged that airlines trust us with. And I think lastly, reducing costs and removing any potential for misuse of any kind of credit or entitlement that has been provided.

Simon Elsegood:Thanks. Mark, speaking of Menzies, we'll turn to your aviation priorities at the moment. So can you talk about some of the new things you're bringing to the sector and the ways that you guys are changing how you support airlines in the region.

Mark Brinkworth:Yeah, no problem at all. And for those that don't know Menzies, we're probably somewhere in your subconscious. Airlines are a bit like my dad used to say, which is better seen not heard. So for the bit of context around who Menzies are, we are, I guess, a partner with most airlines in some capacity across the globe. Almost 200-year-old business started in Edinburgh delivering books for Dickens. Aviation pivot was probably late '80s when horse and cart didn't work anymore. And then over the time there's been a number of acquisitions by Menzies globally which has brought us to today's footprint of about 256 airports across 65 countries. So we're at about a headcount of about 45,000. Within this region, Australia, New Zealand, up through to Hong Kong, we service about 25 airports across about a customer base of about 75 airlines. And I guess the place we play within the market is we sort of try to be everything to everyone, but then also try to have our own identity as well. We understand the pressures of airports wanting consistency and delivery across the airport experience, and then we also feel the pressures of an airline wanting consistency and delivery across their network. And I guess the role that we play is, is try to work within each partnership that we have to try to stay as close as we can to the global standards. 'Cause they're really the rules that we have to play by. I guess during COVID Menzies was able to deepen our relationships with a lot of onshore airlines. Prior to that, we were traditionally an international play. And through those partnerships with Virgin Australia and Qantas Group across multiple ports in Australia, we've learned quite quickly that dealing with onshore airlines is very different to dealing with offshore airlines given the—

Nicholas Trueman:Yeah.

Mark Brinkworth:the uniqueness of the way that they operate. I guess the general rule of approach that we're trying to drive across our businesses is to automate anything you can, streamline it, and simplify it in order to keep it, you know, be brilliant at the basics is the underlying role here. I guess this opportunity with Uber, and Nick will be able to talk about a lot more of the detail, but it was born out of I guess frustration of one of our passenger leaders in Perth when taxi availability in the times of disruption probably was lacking. And I'm sure you've all been on the receiving end at some point of a disrupted flight and all you want to do is get out of the airport. So her frustration in that situation led her to investigate and pick up the phone to Uber to see if there's a better solution. So really proud of the initiatives that she took, which has led to us and what we're going to talk to today. So thank you.

Simon Elsegood:Thanks very much, Mark. Nicholas, I'll turn to you. So Menzies obviously has a long history of ground handling and aviation, but so can you dive into some more on the motivations for your partnership with Uber, what it actually means, what it's changing for you in terms of the business?

Nicholas Trueman:Yeah, absolutely. So our partnership with Uber— sorry, excuse me— has been about 6 months in Sydney, and it's really transformed the way we handle cancellations. Our customer airlines love it, our passengers love it, and probably most importantly, our staff love it. So prior— or sorry, one of the big challenges we face in Sydney is those late-night cancellations bordering on curfew. There's no opportunity to fix or rectify the issue with the aircraft. There's no rebooking options.

Simon Elsegood:Yeah.

Nicholas Trueman:Passengers are tired and frustrated. So how that, I guess, would be handled prior to Uber would be that we would tell passengers living locally to go home, wait for rebooking information from the airline, and any costs incurred, they just need to hold on to receipts and claim that back through the airline, which was obviously not a very popular approach. And what that then resulted in is a lot more passengers advising that they didn't have that option and that they needed hotel accommodation, which then led to a bigger queue to organize hotel accommodation, which takes time. costs additional money, and you could have those cancellations could blow out to multiple hours, 3 or 4 hours to handle. Now with, you know, with Uber, we're able to really streamline that process. So we issue vouchers digitally straight to the passengers, straight to their Uber app, gives them straight to them. We can do that at the boarding gate, we can do that at the baggage carousel, we can do that at check-in. So it's really versatile. It gets those passengers away within minutes. And that then allows us to focus our time on the passengers that don't live locally, that do genuinely need hotel accommodation or other assistance, rather than just sort of housing everybody by default. And it's, yeah, as I touched on, it's been, it's really transformed the way we handle disruptions. The feedback from passengers and customer excellence has been awesome. And one of the big benefits to this versus, you know, other options out there, which we weren't using because of the lack of control, So we set exactly how many vouchers we want to issue, how much money is on each voucher. There's a geofence applied to it so it can only be used for jobs to or from the airport. And we also set a time limit. So if we know everyone's going to be rebooked within 24 hours, we'll set a 24-hour time limit on that voucher. If the voucher hasn't been used within that period, it expires and there's no cost in the long term.

Mark Brinkworth:Great.

Simon Elsegood:So we were discussing earlier some fairly impressive metrics that you guys have managed to deliver. Can you share some sort of real-world numbers and examples of what it's actually bringing to big business partners?

Nicholas Trueman:Yeah, absolutely. And I guess as part of, you know, coming to this panel, we really did a deep dive into the numbers and some of them are quite astounding. So first and foremost, passenger experience. So we found that the average time it takes us from when a flight's cancelled to get that last passenger away from the airport has halved. So previously that could be 4 to 5 hours if you're talking a fully loaded A380 with 500 passengers, we now have that on average to under 2 hours. That's obviously delivering great customer service feedback, which we're getting, you know, fed back to us through our airline customers. And one of our airline customers specifically measures disruption feedback, and we topped that in the Asia-Pacific region recently for them, and Uber was undoubtedly a big part of that. You know, as I touched on already, the sort of control we have over it is really important and something that our airline customers love because ultimately They're the ones that are paying for the disruption. So we're able to give them a snippet within 24 to 48 hours of exactly how much they've spent. They don't waste, or they don't have to wait, sorry, months to get invoices back from suppliers. But I think the most sort of impressive metrics has been the cost savings. So we've been doing this for about 6 months, and while it can be difficult to compare disruptions because no disruption is the same, when we look at the numbers, we're easily saving over $10,000.

Mark Brinkworth:Wow.

Nicholas Trueman:And that comes from a few different areas. So one is labor. So, you know, if we talk about 10 to 15 staff assisting in a disruption was previously 4 hours, is now 2 hours, that's obviously quite a big labor saving that we're able to pass on to the airlines. But the biggest and probably most surprising was hotel rooms. Because we made it so easy to get passengers home, even if they live 30, 45 minutes or an hour away, we've seen our hotel rooms reduced by 62%.

Simon Elsegood:Wow.

Nicholas Trueman:Now, when you're talking, to go back to, you know, 300 passengers on an A330 or 500 passengers on an A380, that's a lot of hotel rooms. If you're saving 62%, there's instances where that is well over $20,000 in savings just off one disruption. And the final one, which we were able to, you know, provide to one of our customers who previously offered taxi vouchers themselves. So when they looked into how much they were spending on each taxi voucher, it was working out about $190 per journey. With Uber, it's $62 per journey for them. So that's nearly $130 per journey. Multiply that across a return journey to and from the airport, and you might have 100 to 150 individuals or families. That savings well above $15,000. So the overall savings that we've been able to, you know, that we've been able to take on first and foremost and then pass on to our customer airlines has been, yeah, really significant.

Simon Elsegood:Yeah, we've been heard a lot today about cost of living and inflation and line items going up in double-digit levels for airlines. So maybe just to build on that last point around costs and pricing and efficiency savings. Josh, can you like just sort of point to where Uber for Business sees its cost advantage for not just like airline passengers, but like staff?

Joshua Prendergast:Yeah.

Simon Elsegood:And other travel around that?

Joshua Prendergast:Yeah, we also partner with airlines to help them manage their crew and pilots' transport requirements, either internationally or domestically. I remember when we first started speaking to the Qantas Group, there, you know, there's real interest. They saw great value in our business technologies for the control and visibility. However, They had concerns around the crew experience, reliability, and safety. Therefore, we ran a trial, a pilot for them over 9 months and over 6,000 trips. And basically what that enabled us to understand, it gave us data to basically be able to quantify the full experience and alleviate those concerns. Also during that trial, they ran their own internal surveys and they received a commanding 93% overall satisfaction rating when comparing Uber to their previous provider. Since then, we have gone on to onboard, you know, close to 10,000 of their crew and pilots onto Uber for Business products within the Qantas Group. Another exciting project that I'm working on with an airline involves one of our business products, an API, and this API is automated to their flight roster. And for this airline, their problem is that they have lots of crew and pilots going to the same location or going to the same direction. However, they don't know each other are. So basically what our API can do, it can facilitate that booking. It can group multi-people, multi-locations, and it can basically tell them which Uber to get into, therefore, you know, streamlining the amount of trips that are required, increasing operational efficiency, and reducing costs for this category.

Simon Elsegood:All right, thanks very much. This is actually quite a short panel, so I might take a bit of an opportunity to open up the stage and to talk about where the partnership's going in the future. It's obviously a relatively young partnership. You've got some big clients, you've got some impressive metrics. So how do we see this sort of relationship evolving?

Mark Brinkworth:Yeah, and you're exactly right, it's in its infancy. So I think the trial and what we've seen today, it makes a lot of sense. I guess You know, as Nick pointed out, you know, the airport is a place where people lose their minds, and sometimes quite literally. And I think what we need to do and what we're trying to do is ensure that our teams on the ground are protected. And this is a really good opportunity to be able to take everyday technologies that everyone's familiar with and to be able to really take away the anxiety for people When they understand Uber, they understand how it works. And when you can merge that in with something that's quite foreign to people, I think there's a level of comfort that comes with that. You know, there's been multiple, multiple events where, you know, our staff have been involved with physical altercations or lots of verbal altercations, which of course we need to deal with appropriately. But I guess anything that sort of tries to de-escalate situations is a real, real big plus for us. There are a number of other opportunities which this could leverage from, and we'll investigate those with Uber. There's other technologies, other suppliers where we are trying to streamline the mishandled baggage process straight to courier rather than sort of double, triple, quadruple handle. That's another solution there to try to get passengers back with their bags and also reduce the need for so much communication, which of course is a huge point of feedback for people. So to answer your question, from my perspective, it is in its infancy, but I am excited to work with Josh and the rest of the Uber team to see what is the art of the possible.

Nicholas Trueman:Yeah, just to add on from what Mark said, I think, yeah, there's some other product offerings Uber has that we're really keen to work on and potentially integrate into our disruption handling. as well as better integrating our systems, airline systems, and Uber so that that voucher distribution process is even more streamlined than it already is.

Joshua Prendergast:Okay.

Simon Elsegood:Joshua, anything else?

Joshua Prendergast:I think from an Uber point of view, we are really proud of our partnership with Menzies, the results it's delivered, and our other partnerships across the airlines industry. We'll continue to innovate the airport experience. As you imagine, it's a huge focus for us, something we really care about. It's been a real privilege to speak to everyone here, that there's some, you know, really senior leaders here and influential people that, you know, have this requirement and you have people or colleagues or teams that manage these requirements. I guess my challenge would be, you know, just because you've been doing something one way, it doesn't mean it's the best way to do it. So I would really encourage you to speak to Uber. We'd love to speak to you, understand your requirements, do some due diligence, and understand if we can deliver some results with you also.

Simon Elsegood:Thank you for that. Well, given Some of my outlook today was focused on cancellations and disruptions, operational performance. It's gonna be interesting to see just what solutions are out there. Just to everyone, if you do wanna know more about Uber for Business, they do have a booth downstairs in the event space, and you can also use the CAPA event app and look up their profile.

Mark Brinkworth:Thanks, Mark.

Simon Elsegood:On that, uh, and with that, I believe we're running out of time, uh, and it's time for, uh, coffee and the networking break. So could you please put your hands together for the panel?

Mark Brinkworth:Thank you.

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