CEO Greg Webb has been at the helm of global travel retail platform Travelport since 2019. He’s seen the company through a global pandemic and plenty of other changes, the culmination of a long career that includes stints at Oracle and Sabre.
At the Global Business Travel Association conference in Atlanta last month, Webb sat down with PhocusWire for a wide-ranging interview on the travel industry, Travelport and more, covering topics from the recent IT outage, to Travelport’s technology updates and the industry’s future.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
I wanted to start with a hot topic. The global IT outage impacted everyone to a degree. What's your take on lessons learned?
You should make sure that your own processes internally are well suited. We have a crisis team - we practice all the time.
It allowed us to recover more quickly and [to] make sure we had information out ... but it's not by happenstance; it's because we practice. And ... a lot of people that don't have that mechanism in place, they should consider [it].
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If the industry doesn't have the safeguards in place that you've just mentioned, what does it need to ensure the same kind of chaos doesn't happen again?
Most of the companies in the industry do have good safeguards in place.
There are a lot of very capable tech providers in the airline IT space and in the travel agency space that also recovered very well.
So I think as an industry … the industry recovered. From an IT perspective, the knock on event of the operational problems that it caused, are an entirely different subject.
Let's focus on Travelport. There has been recent news of layoffs and funding - can you give me an update on the five to 10 year plan for Travelport? Have those moves been in the name of operational efficiency? Do you see mergers and acquisitions happening?
I'd say none of the three are attached.
We did at the beginning of the year refinance our debt. … We did a restructuring of our debt, we had another $570 million equity infusion and the company just really strengthened our balance sheet, lowered our debt significantly, which is great for the long-term outlook of the company. … [It] put us in a really good place.
Second thing is, it did get reported that we had layoffs - we didn’t really have a big layoff. Recently, we restructured two different groups. We restructured our go-to-market group and customer service group. And there just happened to be redundancies.
When I look at the future for Travelport … I think looking 10 years out is impossible, but the industry continues to evolve. It's always been complex.
I mean, if you go back to 2010, roughly, kind of across the entire industry, you had about 500 options … between different fare classes, different cabins, etc. Roughly 500. That number is now 10,000.
So when you look at that complexity … our job is really the same job that GDSs [global distribution systems] started with. GDSs came to life because travel became deregulated.
There needs to be a way for there to be not a one-to-one connection, but many connectivity structures. And so our overall function was to be an aggregator, take content from multiple different places and sell it to multiple different buyers. Our job is the same, it's just ... it's changed now from just being one standard way of ingesting that content, to now being a multi-source content aggregator and trying to make sure that that is as simple as possible for our customers. [It’s] a B2B business but ultimately delivers real value for the consumer.
So when you think about becoming the best multi-source content aggregator in the industry, how does artificial intelligence and generative AI play into that? You recently launched the Content Curation Layer - how do you see that evolving?
I think it's going to over time have a significant impact across the travel landscape. In particular, I think generative AI is getting all the hype now because it's the cool stuff - it's fun to see.
And then there's also the mix of real, more data, analytical, artificial intelligence, as opposed to like a generative AI, which is really a structured way to pull together different data sources to get to and filter out the noise, to get to the meat of answering the question. In all those scenarios, though - and this is why I think it's a huge opportunity for one the industry, but certainly for Travelport - [the technology] is only as good as the data that it sits on top of.
The good news is, we have spectacular data and a spectacular ability to make sure that we can utilize that for good decision-making. So as we look at AI, we look at what are the underlying data science and data models that we need to build out to be able to utilize the AI capability? What are the things that we can use machine learning for that becomes adaptable over time? Because what you're trying to do at the end of the day is get better answers to questions.
How do you see things evolving for the industry? How different will things look half a decade from now with these capabilities?
Ten years is, like, a whole lifetime. I don't know.
But I mean, even five years, I think you will see efficiencies and customer service [get better]. The ability to understand more effectively what a customer is really asking for.
Ultimately, as we refine the data models, etc., [technology] will give better answers because it will better understand. Like today, I say that the shopping component - which is why we built [the] Content Curation Layer - the shopping component has been more of a brute force thing. Start with what are all of the potential options kind of skinny that down to? Here are the ones that make more sense.
How do you figure out which of those are appealing versus not appealing? And that's when you need a system that can learn over time and be able to say, "Well, this never sells."
The bonus of knowing that, though, is the feedback loop to be able to go back to suppliers and stuff to say, "Oh, by the way, do you know this never sells? Yeah, you have it as an option that's out there. But just know it never sells," and providing data back to the suppliers on, here's what sells, here's what doesn't sell … I think that will grow over time as well.
When you think about different relationships in this industry, like relationships between sellers and buyers and suppliers, how are those going to change as a result of having all this information?
I think it puts in a larger emphasis on the need for some standardization. This industry is so intertwined that if you get into a scenario where everybody's doing things differently, it just falls apart. So there'll be this ongoing need for making sure that we operate inside kind of a standard framework then.
But separately, I think, ultimately, better intelligence is good. So better access to data, better tools associated with that do enhance relationships.
I want to talk about the future of New Distribution Capability. Some of the other GDSs have laid out their offer and order strategy, what are Travelport’s plans?
I think when we look at where does NDC go in the future, I think it's a couple of things.
One, getting to a place … which is figuring out how over time is that NDC content really going to differentiate from the content that exists today. Meaning, what does the supplier get out of it? I mean, ultimately, the benefit for the carrier should be a better ability to differentiate their product, a better ability for them to either bundle dynamically price or provide ancillaries and other things that differentiate them from the competition in a way that drives more revenue.
And on the buy side, and the consumer vote side, it should be a way for them to get more of what they want in a more surgical way.
But it still needs to evolve into that.
I think the future of NDC that's going to be successful is a better differentiated offer in a standard way that allows consumers to make good buying decisions.