Amman. It’s 1800 on a Friday and I’m making my way to Bangkok for a conference after having a week holidaying. This is an unusual routing for me, and the chance to try out a new airline. However, I have a ten hour stopover, and even after working through the inbox after a week out of the office, there are still eight or so hours to kill before my departure at sometime in the middle of the night. Many of us have been in the industry years or decades and are seasoned travellers – we have our routines, we know how to kill time at the airport. Our experience though sometimes taints our way of looking at the world when travelling. Ten hours, though, gives a lot of time to observe the average traveller – those that maybe only travel once or twice a year, or are not so digitially savvy as some of use.

Looking around me, I see a lot of untapped demand. The airport is typically a place where airlines try not lose money (through delays causing missed connections, lost bags, overbooked flights and so on), while trying to offset this with maximum conversion prior to commencing the journey. Some will remember the excitement around the use of beacons around the airport, tracking passengers and bombarding them with offers as they strolled through duty free. However, that never really took off as the airlines, airports and ground handlers could never agree on “who owns the customer”. Now though, airlines are “going digital” and hoping to open up a world of possibilities to their passengers. So what would that look like, in real terms? For reasons well known, there is an enormous disconnect between the world of airline commercial retailing and the hard reality of life at the airport, particularly at the gate. But there are a lot of needs at the airport, and while the airline can’t fulfill all of these, some could be with a little more integration and joined-up thinking. I’d like to know where my bags are, for one thing. I’d like to be assured that those extra couple of kilos on my hand luggage are not going to cause me a problem. The lady rushing to the front of the plane upon arrival would have really appreciated some info on her connection (and later, on her bags too!). However, is there revenue in addressing these examples? Potentially, yes – directly (I would be happy to pay for extra kilos of hand luggage) and indirectly, through making the travel experience less stressful. Most airline mobile apps, with the exception of a few, are extremely commercially focussed – they are intented primarily as booking channels and also allow you to check-in. If I compare that with my banking apps, that is the equivalent of simply being able to scan a bill and pay an invoice. But my banking app allows me to do so much more – I can block cards if I think I have misplaced them, set up new accounts, change payment limits, usage locations and so on. In an older blog, we talked about airline super-apps and whether they could help airlines take more wallet share, and as a result own (or at least have insight into) more of the journey. The more an airline knows about you and why (and where) you’re travelling to as well, the more it can take informed decisions and interact proactively through channels such as the airline app. However, the elephant in the room of airline siloed data and the lack of realtime integration between airline IT applications remains. We still live in a world of “if only we could…”, which brings up the other elephant in the (rather large) room – the lack of integrated business processes and the organisations that own them. The shift to Offers and Orders aims to change this, however at the moment we (as an industry) have only added a layer of complexity on top (NDC) but this has not yet driven any change downstream. If Spotify were an airline, they’d be streaming to their subscribers from vinyl records – it’s a nice, shiny layer on top of something very outdated (but still dear to many people’s hearts!). Sometimes this is something that goes forgotten when we, as an industry, try to drive change. We can spend an eternity talking about PNRs, tickets, NDC offers and orders, but the end consumer doesn’t care about any of this – they just want the travel experience to get better. The Offer and Order transformation is a huge undertaking for all players, airlines and IT vendors alike, however sometimes we look at it as an enormous IT project rather than a chance to make something … better.

Because ultimately, isn’t that what digital transformation should be about? Taking friction out of the journey. Helping the traveller feel informed, reassured, even delighted rather than simply monetised. When we talk about retailing in aviation, too often the focus is purely transactional: how to push more ancillaries, how to improve attach rates, how to nudge up conversion. But true retailing is about relevance, timing and trust. It’s about putting the right offer in front of the right person at the right moment – and that moment might be during a long stopover, not just at time of booking.

Imagine an airport experience where your app knows your context. You’ve just landed, your next flight is eight hours away, you’re tired and a bit hungry. Your app suggests a shower room, offers you a discount at a lounge or lets you bid for a business upgrade that might help you get some sleep on the next leg. It tells you where your bag is, gives you real-time updates on your gate and nudges you when your flight is starting to board – not because a timer says so, but because you’re seated at the far end of the terminal.

These things sound simple, even obvious – but they require a level of integration and intelligence that we as an indus are still working towards. And yet, these small details are valuable. A less stressful experience means a happier customer, more receptive to offers, more likely to return. That’s how we start turning the airport from a source of cost and chaos into a place of opportunity – for both revenue and reputation.

So maybe the goal shouldn’t be just to “go digital”, or to “implement Offers and Orders”, or “modernise airline retailing”. Maybe the goal should be to make travel feel less like a test and more like a treat. And if we can do that – thoughtfully, collaboratively, with the passenger truly in mind – then maybe next time I’ve got ten hours to kill, it won’t feel like killing time at all.

 

Nick Stott, Travel in Motion AG