You can hear Craigs from a mile away. He’s big, he’s loud and he wants a new ‘Next Gen’ PATA to be heard. As someone who’s not afraid of conflicts – or the Internet – he might just get his way. Raini Hamdi chats with the new PATA CEO in Bangkok

Martin J Craigs, CEO, PATA

So why did you want the job as PATA CEO?
(Laughs) I was approached and advised on this job during the Paris Air Show in June last year. Like many people, I was invited to put my name in. Initially, I was not sure it was a job I was entirely equipped or suited to do because I’m not a tourism specialist. But I was assured that PATA’s main role going forward would be advocacy, would be creating new value for members, and would relate to how we deliver and communicate our services. And those, I’m interested in.

Now about four months into the job, it has become clear to me that I had accidentally been in training for the job in the last three years, through a taste of the travel business in civil aerospace (Craigs held senior positions at aviation firms such as BAE Systems and Saab-Scania). And, if nothing else, through being a high frequency traveller myself.

When did you first hear of PATA?
The first time must be around 1986, my first year in Hong Kong (where he was previously based for the past 25 years). I had the pleasure to meet the CEO of Cathay Pacific at the time, Peter Sutch, and in the course of conversation, he told me he was going to the PATA conference the following week – it was the best fun event of the year, he said. I had filed that away, thinking this PATA must be a good organisation.

After a long search, and even the debacle of a candidate getting cold feet, do you think your job is a hot seat?
PATA’s had its fair share of ups and downs in recent years. I just look at it as the inevitable result of change – any long-standing association has to change with time and technology.

In many ways, the Internet has somewhat been an enemy of PATA – and thousands others, as people have been disintermediated – but that does not mean there is no value in having an organisation that links people together face-to-face and online – it’s not as if you can only do one and not the other. No, no, the whole point about life generally is finding a balance. And it’s a non-stop process.

It is fair to say it is a hot seat, but in a good way. The PATA CEO is given great respect and hospitality whenever he goes to an event. It’s not me personally; it is the 60 years of work PATA has done to build a reputation for itself. It is a responsibility that has to be respected and built on.

You came in when the direction had been set by an interim CEO in the form of the PATA Future Strategic Focus. Would you have preferred that you got to set the direction yourself as the new CEO?
No. It’s logical – serendipity, in fact – that someone of Bill (Calderwood)’s experience and mindset did the interim CEO job thoroughly. He restructured internally, made the organisation leaner, streamlined a lot of the activities, but he consciously did not embark on a new voyage in terms of the messaging for the Next Gen. I didn’t regret that a lot of the organisation had been shaped by Bill. I felt, to use an analogy, that I had a fairly waterproof ship that had been repaired in the harbour and was now ready to go out on the open seas.

Now, I’m on it and of course we want to catch the wind at the back, getting the support of members, media, etc, by acting in smart and insightful ways. You’ve got to win hearts and minds to a new way of thinking; it’s not just about cold, hard spreadsheet numbers.

“I come from Northern Ireland and conflict resolution, as someone once said to me, must have been built into my DNA…”

How will you fatten PATA’s coffers again?
Innovation, by not depending solely on membership fees but finding new revenue streams and retaining members so you are doing less selling and more auto-renewals. Fundamentally, it is showing the PATA Next Gen activities and then money should flow in the right direction.

Tell me more about this new tagline which you’ve adopted.
It’s a mixture of enhancing our ability to deliver events, research and membership value by making the Internet an ally and, in concrete terms, delivering new-style events.

Examples: webinars on topical subjects, live-streaming highlights from our forums or even our AGMs. Or giving bites of information members might not have picked up through a monthly regional directors’ digest, potentially podcasting these as well. Or delivering meaningful insights from our vast amount of aggregated data through mobile platforms (from April 2).

Let’s talk more about creating new value for members. Have you figured out how?
I want to be truly marketing, not selling. I want to be shaping the product – the value proposition of PATA – according to what the majority want. That to me is real marketing and showing empathy.

What I try to do in the first few months is walk the talk. Do it. That’s why I started the PATA Hub City Forum very quickly (the first was in Bangkok on January 30 with the PATA Thailand Chapter) and people thought I was crazy to do it at a month’s notice and expect the head of Thai Airways International and Tourism Authority of Thailand to turn up, but they did, and so did a good number of people.

Basically, we have to engage people face-to-face and we can’t just depend on our two iconic big events (PATA conference and mart) and the adventure travel mart. We will continue to deliver those in a professional and vigorous way, but we also need to go out and reach the markets.

So instead of expecting everyone to come to us once or twice a year, we go to them and we will try to inject new perspectives on issues critical to those hubs. The next one we plan to do is the Singapore PATA Hub City Forum on May 22.

Another philosophy of mine is clustering. I hear from the senior people I meet that they get so many invitations and they want to make their trips as productive as possible. If they can get two or three events out of one trip, that’s more value for them.

So if we can overlap events, we will. For example, the Airports Council International (Asia-Pacific Regional Assembly, Conference and Exhibition in Singapore, May 22-25), which is immediately after our events. Now this body has (577 members operating 1,689 airports in 179 countries) and airports are part of the travel and tourism cycle. Yet, they are often seen as the weakest link in the chain because they don’t always offer the convenience and comfort.

It is also PATA’s job to point out where the weak links are – hopefully politely and subtly – because when an end-user rates his travel experience, it’s not just the hotel bed or the restaurant food, but  a whole chain of events. If they are kept waiting 45 minutes to an hour at the airport, that’s not a good memory.

Is that an airports or an immigration issue?
Immigration, but the point is, customers think it is an airports issue. An example: Hong Kong generally does a good job of processing people. But in recent years, it has been noticed that there have been sporadic backlogs of people waiting well over an hour. I met the commissioner of tourism and he told me that 96 per cent of people were processed within 15 minutes. Sounds good. However, that’s still a couple of million people who were kept waiting – four per cent of 50 million.

I read a letter in a UK publication from a lady who was really mad she was kept waiting an hour-and-a-half to get into Hong Kong. She got madder when she read in the papers that Hong Kong needed to invest US$17 billion  on a third runway and asked why it couldn’t invest US$17 in an extra hour of an officer’s time, which I thought was a reasonable observation. So my job is to politely raise that up to the system through the people I meet.

What inspired you in the last four months as PATA CEO?
Meeting the very experienced and the youngest members of the industry – Khun Kusa (Panyarachun, managing director, World Travel Service Thailand) who, at 93 years of age, spoke eloquently from the floor during our Bangkok PATA Hub City Forum. Then, I was asked to give a lecture at a university in Beijing. A 19-year-old was tasked to make a welcome speech and she spoke about the dream of travel so emotively, that you realise how travel and tourism touches people’s lives over and above the usual experience of business. And therefore, to be part of it is genuinely a privilege.

How do you unite PATA given the diversity – just look at that age gap, for instance.
Of course there will be problems within PATA; how could you not expect different opinions when you represent roughly 50 different countries and, on top of the national culture,  is the functional culture – this person a GM, the other accountant, government minister, media member. So it is completely expected for there to be 101 different opinions on what PATA should prioritise or do. The pleasure is how to harmonise that to a reasonable consensus.

It is a pleasure?
I come from Northern Ireland and conflict resolution, as someone once said to me, must have been built into my DNA because I’m used to seeing conflict all around me in its most serious forms. And after 700 years we’ve solved that little problem in Northern Ireland. Terrorists are now ministers. So, after seeing that at close range, you can’t say that the kind of conflict that goes on inside of PATA is to be feared or to be avoided.

To do this job, you have to take the views, but someone has to decide to do something or or not to do something. In a multinational, multfunctional organisation, when someone decides to do something or not to do something, it will divide to a certain extent. But if you don’t decide at all – that’s the worst. Then you will drift.

My approach is to decide and take responsibility for that decision. It does not mean I won’t learn some lessons along the way. You’ve got to accept that this (PATA) is a learning organisation in a middle of an incredibly fast-moving industry, in the world’s greatest growth market. There couldn’t be a better time to start talking and delivering PATA Next Gen.

Who influenced you recently?
You can’t not pay attention to the Facebook phenomenon, an idea in one guy’s mind lying on his bed at Harvard and now a business whose market capitalisation is estimated to be worth more than Boeing.

One quote (Mark) Zuckerberg made in his IPO which I read two weeks ago was, ‘you need to move fast and break things’. Speed is the competitive weapon and you don’t need to worry along the way something will drop off the table. As I understand it, it’s the graffiti at Facebook that ‘done is better than perfect’.

Since coming onboard, I’ve had to move fast; hopefully I haven’t broken anything substantially.

I had the luxury of reading a bit more about PATA before assuming the role end-October, and I found that there had been an enormous amount of analysis, introspection almost, on PATA, a lot of it very worthy and eloquent thoughts, like Prof Chuck Gee’s comments in the PATA 50th book. They were mulling over challenges going forward 10-20-30 years ago and it has been an evolution challenge since the start of the Internet, since PATA and every other association became disintermediated.

To do this job, you do have to move fast, you will break things and you won’t please all of the people all of the time.

But ‘done is better than perfect’.

This article was first published in TTG Asia, March 9 issue, on page 8. To read more, please view our digital edition or click here to subscribe.