What can digital technology do for the travel industry? You will tell me “but digital is already everywhere, the industry has adopted it”. On the one hand it is true, but on the other it is questionable.
This is true because the industry has mainly digitized the existing (booking, customer relations), dematerialized (from the boarding pass to the hotel key) and has been, after much procrastination, to reach the customer where he was to talk to him through the channels he uses. An essential but not exceptional update. To keep the promise made to the customer, to catch up, and to be accessible to him where and when he wants is the first of the courtesies, the minimum one can do. Of course there has been a sometimes substantial improvement of the customer experience without any reason to get excited about it. We went from the stone age to the electricity age with 5 years of delay on a customer who was waiting with impatience. The customer appreciates the effort but will not overvalue a company that “just” does its job.
The travel industry has only just caught up with digital
The next step is to add value. Among the options that exist today I will insist on the assistance and the personalization of the service.
However everyone’s doing assistance. Yes, but not for everyone, not at the same level and not with the same degree of customization. There are those who have the “normal” customer service and those who have the special line and the dedicated concierge. Normal. It is a service that costs attention and man time, so it is reserved for premium segments. The lower you are, the less fast, personalized and proactive the service is.
But the strength of digital is precisely to allow “mass customization” and by the logic of the effects of scale allowed by platform logics, to give to the greatest number what was given only to some. When providing a good experience requires less attention and human time, niche services can be generalized. This means giving everyone an individualized and proactive service.
At the beginning of November I attended the “T3 Business Forum, Tourism, Transport, Technology”, an event supported by Aéroports de Paris, Air France, Amadeus and Skyboard, and the collaboration ofWelcome City Lab.
A number of startups were exhibiting in four areas.
– Create zone : “smart equipment”.
– Facilitate zone : “Solutions for customer relations
– Enrich village : “the traveler experience”
– Entertain zone : “the leisure activities of tomorrow
Personal digital assistants: the new frontier of the travel experience
Ironically, it seems to me that it’s in the “enrich” zone that I found my happiness in terms of customer experience, which shows how thin the line is between customer relations and customer experience, or even that it’s a single artificially segmented field (it remains to be seen why).
So I discovered two startups offering what seems to me to be a major, close, inevitable and indispensable advance in the customer experience.
The first one is called PATH. PATH is a travel assistant that, first of all, alerts the traveler at every stage of his journey. Departure, arrival, delays, strikes, gate changes etc.
So you’re going to tell me that this already exists. Well, not really. Not all airlines offer this type of service, not everything is offered to all categories of travelers and, finally, no service covers the entire travel experience. Ce que j’eWhat I mean by this is that having an airline and a hotel each inform me on their side is one thing, but what represents two isolated services on their side is a single trip for me.ntends par là est qu’avoir une compagnie aérienne et un hotel qui m’informent chacun de leur coté est une chose, mais ce qui représente deux prestations isolées de leur coté est un voyage unique pour moi. Bringing everything together in a single assistant by eliminating the airline/hotel silo is more in line with the reality of the passenger experience. Taking into account air, hotel, transfers, car rentals etc., the service follows the passenger’s experience chain.
PATH allows to follow the traveler’s experience chain
But that’s not all. PATH can be proactive and suggest things to me. For example an airport/hotel transfer. Finally, PATH can go much further. Depending on what you let know about your tastes, the application can suggest you a type of restaurant in the evening. Indeed, PATH is not only an alerting tool but an assistant with which we interact.
Can PATH solve problems? Yes and no. In fact, it escalates them to the appropriate entity and follows up. This leads us to explore the product’s business model and to whom it is destined, as this says everything about how it contributes to the passenger experience.
PATH’s clients are businesses and operators in the tourism industry. Businesses because they can make the service available to their employees who travel. All travel information is retrieved from the travel desk when it exists or through the information contained in the confirmation emails sent to the traveler. The “operators” because they can make this service available to their customers in white label. A hotel for its customers for the time of a trip or a tourist office which in the logic of “destination sales” wants to offer a service around a packaged offer involving many actors. A travel agency for obvious reasons as well.
This is why PATH does not manage incidents: being in a B2B2C logic, it is the 2nd B in the chain that has this role, which it values precisely with the end customer. If the service provider were to take over this part, it would “aggressively uberize” the B in question and get angry with its distribution network. Unfortunate.
In short, if PATH is not for you and me (at least not directly) it is a good idea of how companies and tourism professionals can deliver a superior experience to their traveling employees/customers through a service that works at the scale of everyone’s business.
Which doesn’t take me away from the idea that a B2C version of PATH (with just alerting and suggestion) could be very relevant.
The second startup that caught my interest is called Wiidii. Wiidii presents itself as a hybrid personal assistant which, in concrete terms, means that unlike PATH it takes over the management of problems because in addition to the technology there is a very human concierge/majordom service that takes over from the technology when necessary.
In concrete terms this means that you can ask Wiidii to make an appointment for you at the hairdresser’s and moreover ask it to keep you informed about your hollidays bookings etc.
Wiidii: a concierge and an assistant in your mobile
The two booths (PATH and Wiidii) were side by side but I don’t see them as competitors. There is a slight overlap it’s true but I consider PATH more as a professional tool dedicated to the management of my travel experience while Wiidii might be less focused on the subject (but enough for most individual travelers) but will help me more in my daily life as a busy executive.
Interestingly, Wiidii has of course a “business” offer but also a ” personal” offer. This confirms the difference in offer and positioning. But the fact that both have mainly a B2B offering is a strong signal: it is up to the “operators” to bring value to their customers. If the end user ends up building his own travel experience manager, the players in the chain will have missed yet another opportunity to justify their presence, their cost and demonstrate their value. Beware, uberization is threatening: if tourism actors do not offer such services within their offer, others will do it, recover the data, remove one or two links of the chain, etc. We already know the end of the film and it will be too late to come crying.
Personal digital assistants (or “phygitals”) are a major playground for digital in the traveler experience. But next to these two startups that I really liked, I can’t help but add some other things I’ve seen for a while on the other side of the Atlantic.
Wayblazer thinks experience, not product
The first one, which I have had on my radar for a while is Wayblazer.
So you’re going to tell me that this is a purely B2B tool that helps travel agencies create trips for their clients. Yes, but by understanding natural language (in other words, we speak to him in French – or English) and working on the intention he offers a better experience to the agent, an experience that will also reflect on the passenger who will have a real personalized and unique offer.
To get to the point, Wayblazer kills the timeline of building a journey. Before, we used to start from our desires or needs, we would do research to find places that meet them, then we would move on to the phase of finding means of transport, hotels etc. With Wayblazer we will say “a half cultural and half seaside destination at less than 6 hours by plane and where it is not too humid in December”. And the tool will refine its offer by interacting with the person. The idea is to stick to the traveler’s intention, as opposed to preconceived and prethought offers. In a way Wayblazer thinks experience and not product.
Ivy welcomes and serves hotel guests
Note that if today Wayblazer is a tool for the travel agent in front of the end customer, I don’t see why, once the technology is a bit more mature, it wouldn’t become a tool for the end customer.
WayBlazer uses IBM’s Watson technology, which observers praise for its potential in terms of customer relations. Customer relationship is the business of GoMoment which has just announced Ivy, another product based on Watson.
Ivy is a product designed for hoteliers who want to improve their customer experience and relationship.
And there a video is better than all the texts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEtoskhy4AI
Et vous ? Do you have any use case ideas for improving the travel experience through digital?
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