Agoda CEO John Brown on the tech that differentiates

The one piece of tech that could be a true differentiator for an online travel agency is “the skillful application of AI (artificial intelligence) that could make all the difference to really understanding your customer.”

Speaking at the WiT Travel Roadshow, Episode 3, John Brown, CEO, Agoda said, “AI is something everybody is doing,” but there’s the missing link – applying it skillfully to truly serve up exactly what that customer wants.

“When he or she comes along and is looking for a business hotel for a three-day stay midweek, your AI behind the scenes is serving up exactly what that customer wants. Everybody tries to do that.

“But the people who can do that really, really well so that the website really feels like... something where you feel at home every time and you realize, oh, gosh, this is giving me exactly what I’ve always been looking for. I think that really will be a differentiator.”

Another piece of tech that he’s excited about is “enabling customers to check in and check out in the hotel via the mobile app, or to review their folio, or to even use the phone as a room key to get into the room.”

“That’s complicated. nobody’s really cracked that. But I think the person or the company that does that will be a big loyalty builder as well because that will remove one of the big pieces of friction that still remains at least as far as accommodation is concerned.”

Brown said one reason why the problem hasn’t been cracked yet is because “the PMSs are old-fashioned, they’re not easy to work with, and there’s a million different ones out there. But when you really do figure out how to make that happen, that really will be a game changer for the customer.”

He was speaking about the different types of consumer tech that would differentiate one OTA from another. Translation tools and chatbots, he feels, are “table stakes.” 

“Without translation tools, we simply would not exist and all the experiments that we run show the customers saying ‘I want that too (chat),’” he said.

Being able to accept alternative payments is critical as well “but again, I think most people are going to be able to do that, so you’ll need to get that done.”

Brown recalled a product Agoda developed in the fintech space that did not work out as intended but went on to have another life.

“About two years ago, we rolled out a product that would effectively allow us to be a payment processor for hotels. So we would put our own box into hotels so they could process customer credit cards through the rails effectively that were set up by Agoda, and the idea would be that we would save hotels a fair amount of money by doing so.

“It turned out that one, from a regulatory point of view, that was a pretty tricky endeavor –  there were a lot of regulations to go through once you get into that fintech space. And frankly, the profitability was a little bit less rich than we thought over time, so we decided to stop doing that.”

It then took the entire team and pivoted them into a new fintech project. Said Brown, “What we do now is we can self-issue our own virtual credit cards, which allows us to pay our hotels much more easily and much more cost-effectively. So essentially, we took what was meant to be an external product for hotels, turned it into an internal product that sits within our ecosystem. But it still uses a lot of the same underlying expertise.”

To address the growing awareness over sustainability, Brown said Booking Holdings gives sustainability guides to its hotel partners to say “this is the best way for you to move toward becoming sustainable.”

What Agoda doesn’t want to be is “some certification agency that says this hotel is now hereby declared sustainable, because that’s something that you need a separate expertise to do.”

Instead it recommends agencies with that expertise to its hotels and puts badges on its website.

Customers seem to like that, he said. “And once we put a badge like that on our site, saying this hotel is sustainable – one thing I can guarantee that happens all the time is every hotel that doesn’t have that badge, they call us within literally a week and say, ‘hey, how did that guy get the badge? What do I need to do?’ And we say, okay, this is how you go about doing it.

“So you really begin to create the ecosystem and because we have so much customer demand, we can help funnel customers toward the right type of hotel. We really do find that it adds a lot of value to the space.”

After more than year of dealing with a pandemic that has brought cross-border travel to a standstill, especially in Asia Pacific, Brown said he’s had to change some of his thinking. Prior to COVID, he always believed that “Agoda could sort of go it alone, that if we kept executing really, really well, everything would just fall into place and I think that, by and large, it’s true.

“But in the time of the pandemic, it really was more of an ‘all hands on deck, let’s get together and help each’ other mentality. So it was us working with partners, us working with governments in that region, certainly working with our customers. So there was definitely much more of a sense of collaboration getting through this than I may have felt in the past.”

This collaboration with governments is what led Agoda to build its ASQ (Alternative State Quarantine) products which help travelers pick government-certified quarantine hotels in destinations.

The ASQ product for Thailand was built in literally three weeks “once we found out what the government wanted.” It went on to build a similar program in Hong Kong, rolled out one in the Philippines recently, with one coming up in India.

“That’s a great example of how we were able to first of all ask the government, what do you think you need to keep your people safe, to get travelers coming in safely? And then once you make that safety and medically-advised decision, we say that we can use our technology and our people to build it in record time,” Brown said.

*This article originally appeared on WebinTravel.