Industry execs questioned the reality of frictionless travel at the 2024 World Travel Market, running to 7th November in London’s Excel. They discussed the inbuilt complexity of the airline industry and how meeting the traveller demand for frictionless travel requires innovation from technology providers.
“Customers want things to be easy”
The speakers from many different countries discussed “the frictionless future of travel” at The Technology Track, organised and moderated by Timothy O’Neil-Dunne from T2Impact and sponsored by trip.com. Travelport’s head of retailing strategy Mark Lenahan shared the feedback he’s received from customer focus groups, saying that travellers from different source markets have different points of reference regarding their favourite e-commerce brands - outside of travel - to do business with. “But when I asked why, the answer is always the same,- he said, -customers want things to be easy. But in travel we make things complicated” with complex government and regulatory requirements, millions of fares, over-complicated catalogues, and too many booking categories.
Ease of payment is a prerequisite to frictionless travel
Ian Tunnacliffe from T2RL said it’s not the technology that makes the industry complicated, “it’s the underlying business processes that we need to rationalize.” Lenahan said banking has changed for the better as a result of digitization. James Lennon from Stripe noted that payments are now, or should be, as important as marketing and loyalty. “Ease of payment is a prerequisite to frictionless travel, but a customer-centric payment process also inspires trust and positive word-of-mouth.”
Live streaming for Asia-Pacific core markets
On the same panel, Will Plummer, CEO & Co-Founder, Trust My Group, noted that “payments are often seen as the end of the funnel but trust in payments starts when the customer arrives at your web site.” Keynote speaker Boon Sian Chai, managing director and vice president, international markets, Trip.com Group, shared the story of its highly successful Live Streaming product for the Chinese audience. With C-suite buy-in baked in at source to this innovation, the group has now opened a dedicated centre in Bangkok to roll out Live Streaming to Asia-Pacific source markets.
No conclusive answer as to whether tech is causing friction
The Technology Track concluded with a debate between selected panellists nominally divided into those who thought travel technology was the cause of the complexity and those who disagreed. The audience was asked to vote at the end of the debate and the result – within acceptable margins of error – was 50/50. O-Neil Dunne concluded: “Neither the professionals nor the audience could agree whether technology is causing the friction.”
