Your travel will be disrupted… in a good way

The words ‘travel’ and ‘disruption’ don’t really seem like natural bedfellows. When those two terms come together they usually mean lost luggage, overbooked hotels or delayed flights. They’re not words that anyone associated with travel – neither consumers nor vendosr – want to hear.

But at Travelport Africa LIVE conference, attended by both agents and corporate travel bookers from around the country, disruption has been presented as not only a good thing, but necessary if some traditional players in the travel industry hope to survive. To hear Travelport’s GVP head of technical strategy and chief architect Mike Croucher tell it, the fourth industrial revolution has arrived in travel and it behooves the industry to get on board.

“Data is the new oil for most industries,” he says, “and travel is no different.

Croucher isn’t wrong; over the last few years the likes of Uber, Aribnb and other disruptors have caused dramatic upheaval in the industry impacting on everything from hotel bookings to shuttle services to flight bookings at travel agencies. Consider for a second: when was the last time you turned to a travel agent, an airline desk or a hotel to secure what you needed to go on holiday? If those players are to survive, they need to pivot.

Travelport is probably in one of the best positions to help the industry do this. If you’ve never heard of it, Travelport is a platform that is part GDS (global distribution system) and an information provider that offers its partners ‘systems of intelligence’ to help them better serve the varied needs of their customers.

“We take travel content in from our partners – hotels, car suppliers, air travel and the like – and search and distribute that content for travel agencies, OTAs and corporate travel personnel,” says Croucher. “We’re an aggregator of travel. We’re an Amazon for travel; the suppliers are the vendors – they can post their content on our site – and we have a reach of buyers corporate travel and the like.”

“We process 6,000 transactions a second and pricing 6 billion flights a day. We can log every single piece of that data. Through that we can ascertain who is selling well, what sort of packages are selling well, prices that are going up and down on the system,” he says.

While this all may sound rather dry, the applications for Travelport’s data are exciting.

Travelport Africa LIVE showcased some of the proof of concepts through partners such as Microsoft, who showed off a demo called ‘Hawkins’ in which a Travelport plug-in for Outlook allows the user to book flights, accommodation and car rentals without having to leave their inbox. Travel agents, we were told, could use Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality to show prospective travellers lifelike 360 degree representations of streets and landmarks in cities they wish to visit.

One American company, Hopper, has used Travelport’s data to monitor the fluctuation of flight prices globally in order to get their customers the best deal. If you go onto Hopper’s site, you can find out when the best time to buy a flight to a certain destination will be.

Travelport itself is about to take a new step in its operations. While Croucher says he doesn’t envision a time when the platform will be interacting directly with consumers – it’s strictly a B-to-B operation – what it can do is give travel agents and airlines a leg-up by helping them better tailor their services towards clients.

“If you walk into a travel agency and you say ‘I want to go from Cape Town to Sydney’ our database will come back with about 300 options. Which one would you want? These are options broken down over price, airline, level of comfort and more,” says Croucher. “If we can personalise that for you – say, we know someone in your price range is happy to pay for Premium Economy over Economy class or if you’re happy to stop over than flying direct – that’s much better.”

“Building that trip intelligently the persona of the customer is better. We may not know each individual customer but we can build up a persona type based on their requirements – what type traveller you are, what travellers like you tend to do – like the recommendations system on Amazon. It’s a retailing model that says ‘we recognise you have similar tastes to other customers in our database’.”

Croucher says that this new picture will be a boon to travel agents, who will, to a degree need to redefine the service they offer to their clients.

“Travel agencies need to think about their value streams going forward,” he says. “It can’t just be about selling travel anymore. It has to be about servicing the traveller through the duration of their trip. If they can do that through a mobile device so, if at any point, you need help or a recommendation they can help you.”

“A lot of the mundane work will be handled by AI’s and chatbots, but when something goes wrong you will need an experienced human professional behind that to make a difference. They’ve got to be the experts in travel.”

If Croucher’s right technological disruption will erase the repetitive nature of travel while the value will rise. In essence, travel disruption needn’t be a bad thing for consumers and the industry at all.

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