Powered by digital, the travel industry is witnessing a paradigm shift. Today travel has become a connected universe, with travellers preferring to have every bit of information throughout their travel ribbon at their fingertip. The Millennials and Gen Z cohorts believe in investing in meaningful experiences and deeply care about the environment.
Empowered by big tech, these digital-savvy globe trotters intend to maximise their trip’s ROI while also gratifying their social and retail needs “on-the-go.” To live up to their expectations, entities of the travel ecosystem – including travel service providers, travel distributors, and travel retailers – are converging to provide EaaS (Experience-as-a-Service).
With their robust repository of demand-side data such as customer reviews, travel retailers are well positioned to serve hyper-personalised itineraries. However, in order to meet the expectations of the ever-connected travellers and to stand out among competition, retailers will need to up their ante by coupling the ability to hyper-personalise with relevant real-time travel data – for example, airport footfall, weather update, traffic update, points of interests – based on a traveller’s persona to deliver an experience-driven guidance.
To drive this connected, technology-led travel ecosystem and deliver unparalleled travel experience, we are bearing witness to trends that can be categorised into three: aspirational trends, functional trends, and foundational trends.
During a panel discussion on building a strong case for services for corporate travel management at the first ET MICE & Wedding Tourism Summit & Awards, industry experts deliberated on the relationship shared by travel service providers and corporate travel managers and how they take forward the business conversations forward.
Aspirational Trends
The competition to cater to the ever-evolving demands of travellers have led to travel retailers exploring new ways to engage with customers and build loyalty. This drive for out-of-box engagement tactics have led to what we call aspirational trends. Aspirational trends are governed by the expectations of the traveller and driven with the vision to empower them to make the most of their trip by spending optimally across the travel ribbon. Platforms developed are characterised by seamlessness of experience across channels, intuitiveness of the interfaces and connectedness of information exchange. Despite the advocacy of this trend, only few developments mature over time to be accepted by the travel distribution ecosystem and absorbed into the mainstream. A few examples to site include, augmented reality- and virtual reality-enabled trip planning, digital travel assistance throughout the travel experience, hyper-personalised recommendations for food, dynamic promotions based on traveller’s persona and unified guest communication platform.
Functional Trends
Developments from the above trend that mature over time and get adopted by the entities of the travel ecosystem (i.e., service providers, distributors & retailers) as features and functionalities across various B2E/B2B/B2C solutions fall under the functional trends category. This comes from the realisation that a travel service provider’s opportunity to delight customers increases manifold when they mindfully factor a traveller’s end-to-end journey and partner with service providers in the adjacencies to offer contextual loyalty programs.
Let us take Delta Air Lines as a case in point. The brand pioneers in contextual loyalty program by tying up with Lyft, Starbucks, Airbnb and Ticketmaster. A Delta traveller can take Lyft ride to the airport, sip a Starbucks coffee while waiting at the Airport, fly on Delta Air Lines to reach their destination, stay in Airbnb and use Ticketmaster to book local entertainment, all the while benefiting from shared loyalty.
Further, service providers and distributors are leveraging Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) to amp up experience quotient and customer satisfaction. Sabre, for example, has created an Automation Hub that takes care of repetitive manual tasks such as booking management, scheduling change alerts, PNR documentation, cancellation, and confirmation, which can save up to 72% of an Agent’s time.
Sustainable travel is another functional trend that has gained significant importance over time. In a survey by The Vacationer, over 71% of adult Americans would pay more for a lower carbon footprint vacation. Travelport + GDS distribute carbon emissions data for flights along with their price and availability. This empowers traveller to choose more sustainable options of travel.
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Foundational Trends
Platforms and solutions that define the business model and support the basic interaction of various entities across the travel ecosystem in terms of connectivity standards, exchange protocol, and standardisation of data formats become foundational. Such trends generally remain valid across a longer span of time. For example, New Distribution Capability (NDC), API-based third-party interfaces, pay-per-use or transaction-based pricing, etc.
NDC’s data exchange philosophy is gradually shifting the balance of power in favour of travel service providers from the travel distributors, allowing them to create offers and packages for consumption across any channel – distributors, retailers, or travellers. This shift has prompted travel distributors to forward integrate and seek value in the travel ribbon. Today, 60+ global airlines are live on NDC. Air Canada is encouraging the adoption of NDC by incentivizing bookings. To realise the full potential of NDC, all entities in the travel ecosystem will need to adopt the standardised (API based) mode of data exchange. Additionally, data readiness becomes important for such interoperability.
All the above-mentioned trends are already being realised in some shape or form, backed by a plethora of technologies and solutions and underscored by the demand for connected travel. Travel distributors and retailers are mindfully adopting these to empower and encourage travellers to engage, purchase, use loyalty (contextually), pay and get travel purchases delivered to their preferred destination while on-the-go. IoT continues to play a significant role in data assimilation from various components of experience, and AR/VR promises to deliver connected experience to travellers. The drive for enhanced experience and intuitive interface will make Generative AI a consideration when building the travel industry of the future.
With technology evolving at a rapid pace, it would be interesting to watch how travel distribution evolves over time.
The author is Senior Vice President, Travel, Transport and Hospitality at LTIMindtree
DISCLAIMER: The views expressed are solely of the author and ETTravelWorld.com does not necessarily subscribe to it. ETTravelWorld.com shall not be responsible for any damage caused to any person/organisation directly or indirectly.
