Airlines are risk averse. Everybody knows that, right? And rightly so – safety and risk management in the aviation industry is something that must be taken seriously. Ensuring safe operations is the single most important topic for any airline, and we as an industry collaborate to ensure that thousands of flights take off and land every day without incident – that is risk management (rather than aversion) at its finest. Part of ensuring safety in the air is having rock-solid IT systems on the ground that enable this – flight planning, flight operations management, weight and balance and so on. Indeed, airlines have historically been pioneers in running large-scale IT operations that could support a global business operating non-stop around the clock. But now, when we are talking about modernising airline IT, some of these airline applications look a bit, well… clunky. As with many that are pioneers, you often get overtaken by others that learn from your early mistakes. Or you reach a level of maturity that becomes costly and difficult to disentangle. As an industry, we have known this for years, probably decades – while we still have our monolithic reservation systems, the world of IT has moved on dramatically. Pretty much everything has “gone digital” – how we listen to music, watch TV, how we bank, how we shop, how we dress ourselves and even how we meet the love of our life.

How has this been made possible? Well, the advent of the internet helped of course, but more critically the way we build and run software applications has fundamentally changed. Cloud computing has enabled a degree of agility in building software that was not present ten, or even five years ago. Nowadays, a new digital services company can bring its product to market in a matter of months, sometimes even quicker. In the airline industry, sometimes implementing a new SSR can take longer. A new codeshare partnership? Let’s not go there. New cabin products? Ok, let’s stop with the scary examples J

While airlines have managed to “go digital” to a certain degree, the core is still old and clunky (some older and clunkier than others, but still in relative terms “old”). So, when we talk about changing these core systems, we realise that we maybe do not have the agility that other, younger industries may have. The monolithic nature of the airline IT landscape certainly does not make transforming easier, although here we come back to the topic of airlines and “risk aversion”. We spend a lot of time talking with airlines and vendors about transformation – where to start, what is the value, where is there least risk? How do we break down this “legacy” technology stack into manageable chunks? There is a perception that the airline retailing transformation journey is a path frought with danger, that it is something akin to the “knife-edge” PSS migrations that we all love to reminisce about (but wouldn’t want to repeat). Indeed, given that one possible (and, for some at least, desirable) outcome of the transformation is a more modular IT landscape, it is a clever tactic of some incumbents to paint this picture (“better the devil you know”). But is this really the case? Is the airline retailing transformation such a mammoth undertaking that it could threaten the commercial existence of an airline? (We used to say that if an airline was unable to operate for more than a handful of days, they would be out of business). While some may see it this way, I don’t think so – I think this is rather a case of us (as an industry) falling back to our “risk averse” way of thinking. Yes, there will be risks along the way, but the key to making the journey as risk-free as possible is having the right mindset. Risks should not stop us taking bold moves – we just have to play the game with careful consideration. Disentangling the legacy wiring of our industry will take years – we all understand this. But if we break this down into manageable, bite-sized chunks, we not only make progress more quickly but also reduce the risks as much as possible. We make small steps that have a low impact, manage this carefully, learn from the approach and repeat the exercise. Indeed, some airlines we work with are already on this journey – taking the first steps to bypass some legacy processes and tech to prove out the feasibility of their Offer and Order transition approaches.

So yes – airlines may be risk averse, however that’s not the same as being change averse. The airline retailing transformation will involve risk, but that does not mean the journey is something to fear — it’s something to manage, deliberately and thoughtfully. Just as we already manage risk every day in operations, compliance and safety, we can apply that same discipline to our commercial technology. The journey toward modern retailing is not a single leap, but a series of deliberate steps — tested, learned from and repeated. And many airlines are already on this path, bypassing legacy constraints to explore what’s possible in Offer and Order transformation.

If you’d like to explore how to take the first steps (or the next ones), we’d be happy to talk.

Nick Stott, Travel in Motion AG

This post has been published in collaboration with Terrapinn.