“Mega budgets come with mega responsibilities”
Saudi Arabia may have bucketfuls of money to spend on the development of tourism in the kingdom, but those riches come with a responsibility that the money is wisely spent, and Saudi intends to do exactly that, chief executive of the Saudi Tourism Authority, Fahd M. Hamidaddin, told the audience during a session at this year’s Phocuswright Conference.
Hamidaddin made his remarks at a conference session entitled the Bridge Series – Innovating Travel & Tourism for the Future, moderated by Siew Hoon Yeoh, founder, WIT and editorial director, Northstar Travel Group Asia, and Pete Comeau, managing director, Phocuswright.
The Bridge Series – linking the online travel world – explored how to achieve the right balance between technology and humans to improve all aspects of travel, from planning to booking to the destination experience.
Hamidaddin described tourism as “the new oil” for Saudi Arabia with the sector predicted to increase its share of the kingdom’s GDP from 3% currently to 10% under Saudi’s Vision 2030 diversification from oil strategy.
Part of that strategy is to drive tourism through the arts, culture and sport (Saudi is the sole bidder for the 2034 World Cup soccer tournament).
Hamidaddin said the target is for 100 million visitors by 2030, and the development of sites like 7000-year-old AlUla – which he described as “Petra on steroids” – and Red Sea resorts could be developed sustainably “and provide a reference, hopefully, for other destinations”.
“We can also learn from the experiences of other destinations, about being creative, about building big, yet remaining authentic. The more financial resources you have, the bigger the responsibility, so while people talk about mega projects, we call them mega responsibilities, because if we don’t do things right, the world is going to be unforgiving.”
Data is key, but travel lags the others
The Bridge Series panellists were challenged to identify what lessons they had learned from non-travel companies and how those lessons might be applied to travel products.
Schubert Lou, COO, Trip.com, who came into travel from Meituan, which started in food delivery and then grew into a retail giant including selling travel, said the travel industry has very fragmented data “whereas in traditional e-commerce you have end-to-end data control. You can track that data so deep that you know exactly how to do the right routes and how to cut delivery time from 43 minutes down to 28 minutes.
“We need to come together as industry and figure out how we can make the data more accessible, and then scale it across multiple countries and locals and make it something that everybody can use.”
Responding to a question about a non-travel company that that he looks up to for product creation and inspiration, Damian Scokin, CEO of Latin American online travel company, Despegar.com Inc said rather than individual companies Despegar looks at “specific things well done by some of our competitors”.
“The beauty of our business,” he said, “is that it’s all out there. It’s very easy to learn from the best.”
For Lou, there was one word to describe what he looked to learn from other non- travel companies: Payments.
Asked to choose from nine possibilities for travel in the age of AI, Hamidaddin chose personalisation. “Everything we do is based on segmentation, starting with demographic segments to psychographic segments to segments of behavioral profile based on historical data that we get from our partners. The next generation is the segment of one and that cannot happen without a single unique ID.”
For Lou, the connected trip translates to Trip’s plan to create an entire end-to-end ecosystem within a person’s app which is being addressed by Trip Genie, an AI travel assistant incorporated into its mobile app and designed to enhance travel planning and booking on its platform.
For Scokin, the connected trip is also a key issue although he doubts it can be achieved, even with better technology, “across a fragmented value chain like ours”.
Watch the full session:
