PEEK INTO THE FUTURE: In this section, Raini Hamdi asks industry leaders to pen their thoughts on what the future will bring. Here is Francesco Violante, CEO, SITA on the future passenger journey

As technology becomes a normal part of people’s travel experience, it is continuing to uproot the traditional passenger journey.

One major area is the rise of the connected aircraft. By 2016, more than three-quarters of airlines will deploy tablets, onto which information such as passenger name lists, passenger bag load status and connecting flight information is loaded, thereby improving the passenger experience.

Passengers are beginning to expect to use their mobile devices onboard for calls, Internet, emails and entertainment, with those signing up for inflight connectivity through SITA’s subsidiary OnAir increasing year on year.

Most airlines and airports are also investing in business intelligence, which will furnish passengers with information they say they want – flight times and bag status, for instance, or waiting times at check-in, security and checkpoints.

A third trend is m-commerce, enabling passengers to purchase travel services on the move. According to our surveys, once passengers have bought their tickets, nearly 40 per cent would purchase ancillary services while en route – such as paying for parking or buying a lounge pass. Most airports plan to offer m-commerce in the next two years, while airlines see it as a new frontier in retailing.

SITA is also involved in some exciting collaborative innovations and developments at airports that promise significant change. At check-in, SITA’s trial with Virgin Atlantic of wearable technology, including Google Glass and Sony Smart watches, demonstrates great potential to enhance passengers’ travel experiences.

The trial enabled concierge staff to meet and greet VIP passengers with a personalised check-in service. But we are only at the beginning of a learning curve that could see wearable technology impacting other areas across the airport and aircraft maintenance.

Also at the airport, we are starting to pilot beacon technology that could open up a range of low-cost possibilities for interacting with passengers, such as determining passenger location, navigating the airport and much more. Developments in passenger flow monitoring are another great example of IT benefiting the passenger experience and increasing airport efficiency.

The next major technology-led trend at airports is self bag-drop. We are seeing the rise of bag-drop areas at airports, although our surveys find that passengers are still cautious. Our work includes self bag-drop at Melbourne and Brisbane airports in Australia.

With IATA’s and Airports Council International (ACI)’s SmartSecurity, the industry is working on the next generation of checkpoint. IT is the enabler, helping to optimise processes. New biometrics kiosks are a prime example of change to come, as they fast track international arrivals, enabling a ‘land, touch and go’ procedure.

Our work involves the introduction of Automated Passport Control self-service kiosks at Orlando Airport as well as new self-service passport control kiosks at Miami International Airport.

If we are going to create this new journey then continued investment in IT is essential, along with infrastructure based on global standards and interoperability between technologies, sharing data securely and using common processes and approaches. That means backing IATA’s and ACI’s programmes to deliver a better passenger experience.

We see common-use technologies as vital to the new journey. Passengers do not want to learn how to use different technologies every time they use a different airline or go to a different airport.

Finally, we need to decide who owns the passenger, and work together to share the benefits of business intelligence and analytics because these have great potential to improve our industry’s processes and the passenger experience.

By Francesco Violante, CEO, SITA 

This article was first published in TTG Asia, August 8, 2014 issue, on page 10. To read more, please view our digital edition or click here to subscribe.

PEEK INTO THE FUTURE: In this section, Raini Hamdi asks industry leaders to pen their thoughts on what the future will bring. Here is Adam M Goldstein, president & chief operating officer, Royal Caribbean Cruises on the future shape of cruise ships

People sometimes ask me if there will ever be a cruise ship larger than our Oasis-class ships. My answer is yes. It’s clear from history that ships get larger over time. There may be a longer-than-usual hiatus as Oasis-class represents a significant increase in guest occupancy (5,400) and GRT (225,282), but it is highly unlikely that there will never be a bigger ship.

The only certainty is that cruise ship size and design will respond to consumer preferences. Over the last 15 years the average size of cruise ships has expanded rapidly. While economies of scale result from increases in size, at least to a point, this efficiency goal has not been our focus. The primary driver has been the desire of customers for ever more options, choices and variety. The proliferation of specialty restaurants, entertainment venues, themed bars and action-oriented experiences is the visible manifestation of this insistent pressure.

I’m comfortable forecasting that this consumer-led desire for diversity of experiences will continue. I’m considerably less comfortable predicting what these experiences will be. After all, when Royal Caribbean began in 1970 with the first purpose-built ships for warm weather cruising, no one could have imagined rock climbing walls, ice skating rinks, surfing, sky diving, digital signage or pervasive Wi-Fi, not to mention the elimination of the main dining room as on the forthcoming Quantum of the Seas with its Dynamic Dining concept.

I’m also comfortable forecasting that four critical elements of ship design and construction will continue to play a crucial role in the cruise industry’s development.

First, technology will be ubiquitous. In less than 20 years we have transitioned from marketing the benefits of disconnecting from daily life to calling out improvements to online connectivity. This is the beginning of a revolution in the guest and crew experience with unforeseeable developments ahead.

Second, safety and environmental sensitivity will continue to be front and centre. We take responsibility for our guests and crew every time a cruise ship leaves port and this will not change.  Nor will our need to protect the oceans on which we sail. Continuous improvement in this domain must be unceasing.

Third, fuel efficiency will only grow in importance but how this quest will manifest itself in terms of types of fuels, propulsion and power generation is unpredictable.

Finally, destinations will continue to emerge around the world, especially in Asia, over the upcoming decades. These new ports-of-call will often lack the ability to handle the largest cruise ships early in a port’s maturity curve. So it’s highly likely there will continue to be a variety of ship sizes and a need for appropriate tendering services as well as permanent docks, regardless of the size of the source markets that produce the customers.

Taking all of the above into account, it’s clear Royal Caribbean and the cruise industry will continue to push the boundaries of cruising as we have known them. It will be exciting to see the innovations unfold.

By Adam M Goldstein, president & chief operating officer, Royal Caribbean Cruises

This article was first published in TTG Asia, August 8, 2014 issue, on page 10. To read more, please view our digital edition or click here to subscribe.

PEEK INTO THE FUTURE: In this section, Raini Hamdi asks industry leaders to pen their thoughts on what the future will bring. Here is Brett Tollman, CEO, The Travel Corporation on the future of traditional distribution

Brett Tollman (second from right), his parents Bea and Stanley Tollman (centre), with Robin Yap (right) and team in the Singapore office.

We are often asked and challenged about The Travel Corporation’s long-standing, dedicated engagement and reliance on the traditional travel agency distribution model. We consistently repeat our belief, as follows:

Leisure travel has certainly evolved and changed significantly over the past 40 years, everywhere. However, when a customer is looking to buy a great holiday which has added value, is an enriching experience and matches their expectations, a very good travel agency is still the best way to ensure these objectives are met or even exceeded in many cases. This is as valid today as it was in the past. So many potential customers today are time poor despite their excellent multi-tasking skills, have overloaded work schedules, are connected almost 24/7 yet are still trying to lead a relatively good work-life balance. I can personally validate this and I use a great travel agency in Los Angeles for ALL of my personal and family travel plans.

The Travel Corporation today is relatively complex and diverse, operating 30 brands in over 60 countries, with 38 offices globally. In each of our ‘selling’ markets, we work closely to support and engage our travel trade partners. We have evolved our traditional, original ‘tour operating’ model to immersive, curated life-changing experiences, be they guided holidays on Trafalgar and Insight, luxury river cruises with Uniworld, or independent soft adventure travel with Adventure World, to name a few. All of our brands and products still need great travel agency professionals to promote, explain and book via our call centres around the world. In fact, we are now moving to a 24/7 ‘follow the sun’ policy to provide our agency partners with an ‘always open’ call centre solution, recognising that many of them work at home today, and early or late.

The future is very bright too: WTTC, UNWTO and Oxford Economics predict massive growth in travel over the next 10 years, especially out of and around Asia. So this is an industry that will enjoy continued success in the future. Technology will keep evolving, to both benefit and challenge our industry. Google Glass and other mobile device adoption creating new connected travellers to online predictive search, and dynamic packaging by the OTAs, will continue to challenge the traditional agency model.

Attracting, hiring, training and retaining a new generation of agency staff is critical – we as an industry still have to do more to ensure this happens. That for me is the biggest challenge we face together, something WTTC is working hard on with its global members through its Tourism for Tomorrow working group focusing on our industry’s future human resource scarcity issues.

Those who will succeed and endure in the future are those companies that get this, and are also able to master the opportunities of Big Data and other such tools to better understand, engage and communicate one-on-one with their customer database. One has to be agile, adapt and change as needed while still providing the same fundamentals of any successful business: giving great customer service, working hard and being a good employer.

I was impressed when I recently saw the Dynasty Travel Singapore’s tablet developed for its consultants to go to time-poor customers’ offices and homes, engage them and book their travel where they want to be. This highly competitive, dynamic, fast-changing landscape is everywhere – whether in Asia, North America, or Southern Africa, where we ourselves operate a growing retail agency business, Pen Travel. We have to keep sharing, learning from each other and helping each other to succeed, to ensure our businesses are sustainable.

Recent research in the US validates the importance and future of the traditional retail agency. The 2014 American Automobile Association (AAA) survey (below) confirms that while most people are comfortable with and reliant on their own online research, when it comes to booking their holiday, especially those other than a basic airline booking, car rental or standalone hotel booking, they place their highest confidence in a professional travel agency to book (59 per cent for AAA-branded travel agencies and non-AAA branded travel agencies combined). It is also exciting to see our next generation of travellers validating the importance of a professional travel agency for booking, after friends and family, with the older generation highly recommending an agency in many cases.

US adults place the most confidence in the accuracy of travel planning information from ‘family and friends’ (39%). Respondents who are 18-34 years of age place more confidence in the accuracy of travel planning information from ‘family and friends’ than respondents who are 65+ years of age (42% vs 32%).

The travel information services US adults have most confidence in after ‘family and friends’ are ‘providers of professional ratings such as AAA’ (33%) and ‘travel agency’ (26%).

Women are more likely than men to place confidence in the accuracy of ‘providers of professional ratings such as AAA’ (41% vs 25%), ‘travel agency’ (30% vs 22%) and ‘social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter’ (16% vs 9%).

Households with less than US$35,000 annual income place more confidence in the accuracy of ‘online travel agency such as Expedia, Priceline or Hotwire’ and ‘social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter’ than households with income of US$75,000 or more.

So our collective future remains bright and we remain very dedicated and focused on the traditional travel distribution model. We will continue to work hard to ensure as many travel agencies as possible are highly profitable. With a strong price integrity model, when agencies book our brands, they make great money in working closely with us.

Source: American Automobile Association (AAA)

By Brett Tollman, CEO, The Travel Corporation

This article was first published in TTG Asia, August 8, 2014 issue, on page 10. To read more, please view our digital edition or click here to subscribe.