World Aviation Festival 2023 Day 1 brought intensive discussions on enhancing travel experience, new payment methods and retail opportunities.
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GLODay 1 at World Aviation Festival included exciting panels and insights from global airlines leaders and solution experts.
Fireside Chat on Building Bridges between Aviation & Hospitality to Support the Future of Travel highlighted that:
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– while the first 12 months of the pandemic saw little business travel, it started to pick up in the last months as people went back to offices and re-started business travel
– digital nomadism and group travel are 2 key trends with 15% of employees able to work from anywhere
– “Revenge travel” translates a lot into group or team travel
– 70% of Asia travel is “bleasure travel” and is here to stay
– key post-Covid trends include the rise of SME business travel which have different structure and speed of approval and are more entrepreneurial – hence, people are getting on trains, bus, and cars in order to grow their business
– some airlines hence offer multi-modal options, mostly Air-Rail (still train systems and technology even in Western Europe have challenges with API integration)
– Sustainability is firmly on the agenda of Business travel managers, with Microsoft giving their employees travel tax, which is transferred to their green budget.
Panel on Consumer payment trends and its implication for B2B payments key takeaways included:
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Key pillars identified in the recent payments survey:
1/ Flexibility – Consumers want flexibility in payment options.
2/ Convenience – 8% of consumers will not buy if something goes wrong in the ticket booking process. Research in Switzerland shows how much is really discretionary spending. 7% will not go or proceed with the purchase if something goes wrong in the booking process. 93% will go no matter what.
3/ Security – How important is a security check? Even in the US consumers said that it is very important. 3D security check will protect against social engineering, phishing, fraud, impersonation, etc
Panel on Modern airline retailing in an era of ChatGPT, emerging FinTech’s and flexibility in the next normal – What does it all mean for the ongoing retailing revolution?
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– business conditions are getting tougher with “already cold wind blowing due to higher oil prices”
– If we look beyond “shiny” apps we need to change the backbone, which is 60s technology with paper tickets and “analog logic”. This tech which is based on paper technology might last for the next 5-6 years. We need to work on the Dynamic pricing side.
– PSS is the elephant in the room.
– Ideas to reform are not new and started in 2011, but were dead for a few years. 2 years ago several airlines formed an IATA-supported consortium to try to implement new technologies.
– Some new companies are offering solutions to transition from PSS – both from within and outside. They are mostly tech companies specializing in aviation. The challenge is that we have to build the whole backbone and also focus on building a better system beyond the airline.
