With less than one week to go until Travel Technology Europe returns for its 17th year, we bring you a sneak preview of some of the insights you can expect from the show’s 90+ expert speakers and panellists.
Speakers from Daktela, Groupdesk, Nezasa, A Bright Approach, Transcendence and CWT share their thoughts on some of the key trends and challenges facing the travel sector in 2020.
What are the key tech challenges currently facing travel?
Steve McSherry, commercial director at Daktela:
- In today’s digital world people value human interaction more than ever. One of the main challenges therefore is how do we strategically blend both technology and human interaction to provide the best service for our customers? When would they want to self-serve and when do they need a personal approach? Fine tuning your customer experience and finding the perfect balance is not impossible, but it’s always going to be a challenge.
Paul Stephen, CEO at Sagittarius:
- Travel brands are fighting to keep up on numerous fronts. Be it for distribution or direct customer sales, the pace of change and customer expectation is phenomenal. At the same time most travel brands have legacy technology at their core and this is very difficult to change and holds back progress. Marketing teams are being more innovative but legacy operational IT prevent such agility.
Renee Tsielepi, enterprise transformation consultant at Transcendence:
- In travel technology we are just not fast enough and we’re not keeping up with the exponential growth of technology. This is our one single biggest challenge.It’s not the big fish that eats the small fish, it’s the fast fish that eats the slow fish.
What are the biggest opportunities?
Tsielepi:
- There are so many at the moment but VR/AR is still huge for me. Digital technology is able to provide you with an incredible way to represent your brand within the digital domain and offer an amazingly competitive edge. I constantly use my Oculus Rift to research my next destination and or hotel, getting the whole family involved. The research process of a journey for a traveler takes the longest and VR can cut through all of this very swiftly, unleashing huge opportunities.
McSherry:
- Cloud Based Technology has been around for many years now, but as more and more business start to embrace aspects such as Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality, the Cloud will become even more significant. With Cloud based technology you can future proof your business, leapfrog your competitors and engage with a wider customer demographic quicker and easier without the need for huge investment in technology.
Manuel Hilty, CEO at Nezasa:
- The challenge is - as often - also the opportunity. Whoever is able to simplify those end-to-end processes for the users, despite their immense complexity, and to automate them in a reliable way will create substantial value for the industry.
What is preventing the sector from taking advantage of these opportunities?
Hilty:
- Solving complexity takes time, it does not happen overnight. Many companies are working already on those problems, but there will still be a lot of work to be done over the next few years. This includes creating and optimising simple yet flexible end-to-end travel processes that are enjoyable to end users, while hiding the underlying complexity.
Tsielepi:
- In many cases - Funding. Think about it, in challenging times the first area to get funding cut is in innovation. I believe most (if not all) organisations want to do more, however many organisations are still undergoing digital transformations or moving from legacy monolithic platforms or are focused on more tactical solutions. So many are just trying to keep up with technology, as its growing at an exponential rate.
McSherry:
- New technology can also mean that staff skills sets need to be addressed. Upskilling your employees to use new technology and adopting a skills-based customer service strategy that ensures customers engage with staff who are most proficient in the customer's communication channel of choice.
What is the most over-hyped technology at the moment and why?
Rachel O’Brien, chief technology officer at CWT:
- As within pretty much all industries, Blockchain within the travel arena is over-hyped. It’s often defined as technology looking for a use case. And many start-ups attempt to squeeze it into their product to gain investor attention, when much simpler proven technology solutions such as distributed databases would suffice.
Janice Sousa, CEO at Groupdesk:
- There is a place for Blockchain but there needs to be a conversation around why we would want blockchain and what network this powerful technology can unlock for us.
Charlotte Lamp Davies, founder at A Bright Approach:
- I was going to say blockchainbut I actually think the technology is beginning to find its place in travel. The problem blockchain encountered initially was that many blockchain specialists overcomplicated explaining its usefulness to travel. Blockchain is here and it will have its day in travel, soon, I predict. It’s a distribution tool. It’s not complicated.
Hilty:
- You can be over-hyped and still be very important. Take artificial intelligence, for example. On the one hand, everyone talks about it, but few use it in a meaningful way yet - the main characteristics of over-hype. I also don’t believe that AI will solve all the challenges in the travel planning and booking process. In many regards, we don’t have enough data points about the users and people don’t want a machine to do all the planning for them because planning can be fun!
Find out more...
Hear more from the above speakers and many others at Travel Technology Europe, taking place at Olympia London on February, 26 and 27, 2020.