Travel leaders talk about the innovations that excite them

The most innovative companies are developing products to address the shifting preferences of travelers.

To get a handle on which innovations have the attention of travel insiders, Phocuswright Europe 2023 brought together three industry leaders: Karen Bolda, senior vice president of product and technology at Expedia Group; Ross Veitch, CEO and co-founder of Wego Group; and Philip Yan, managing director and head of international flights at Fliggy-Alibaba Group.

They spoke about the influence of artificial intelligence, revenue performance insights and all-you-can-fly passes, among other things. Moderators Pete Comeau, managing director at Phocuswright, and Siew Hoon Yeoh, the founder of Web in Travel, prompted the panelists to discuss what they’re working on.

Said Veitch, “A high priority for us now is building a natural language voice interface through our mobile app, and the objective is to be able to have a user interact with it as if you’re sitting over a desk with a travel agent.”

“We’re working on our Rapid lodging [application programming interface]. … The really cool thing is no matter what sort of changes that we’re making, we want to make sure that all of our partners and all of our travelers get that benefit,” Bolda said.

“Something that we realized with Rapid is we were only releasing features every six months. ... And we saw an opportunity - all of our partners need this innovation. They need it faster. That’s where we moved to an evolving framework. With this evolving framework, all of these features that are being built as part of our platform, being made available for our travelers and our partners, they’re now ready immediately. Users can adopt them right away.”

Said Yan, “China has 14% of the capacity of all the airplanes that are flying in the world. So there’s a huge initiative, huge test ahead of us in doing, promoting low-emission activity when there’s travel involved. On the tech front, I have to circle back to generative AI and ChatGPT. … If you use ChatGPT and … copy the entire page of [fare rules] and ask it to display a standardized refund and change rule, you’d be surprised how accurate ChatGPT is. Actually, we have put this in production. Obviously, we can’t rely 100% on that result, but it provides a really good second set of eyes to what our system is doing today. This way a customer would always know what are the penalties if I have to change or cancel my ticket. I think that’s helped us big time already with ChatGPT.”

Watch the entire discussion in the video below.