IN the last year, tech teams have built platforms that went unused and scrapped projects only to repurpose them later in new incarnations; as Thomas Edison said once upon a time, “Just because something doesn’t do what you planned it to do doesn’t mean it’s useless.”
Well if you worked in travel tech in 2020-2021 you’d be forgiven if there were moments when it felt like nothing you built did what you planned it to; it’s hard for travel technology to work when travel doesn’t.
Just before Covid hit Chan Chee Chong, co-founder & CEO of GlobalTix, built a travel agent frontline system where agents could set prices, especially during road shows and events – which now no longer take place.
Richard Kua, vice president of product for Wego talks about building destination pages together with their partners around the same time. With the pandemic though, the pages have remained unlaunched.
For David Liu, chief product officer at Klook the white elephant was a point-to-point train ticket booking system, which was envisioned as a way to help travellers to purchase train tickets anywhere. As he put it, “since Covid has hit, the only market we could really take that out is in China, which then got locked down as well.”
But our product chiefs don’t think of these products as useless, just, not useful yet. Along the way, they say, they learnt important lessons about working within and across teams.
Group chief technology architect of Accor Asia, Khang Nguyen Trieu describes building a tracking tool for corporate travellers as “very painful”, as splitting the development process into different phases across multiple cities starkly highlighted that “we are not really agile yet.”
Recovery will be built on tech, old thinking needs to be challenged
Hopefully the lessons are well learnt, because as vaccination rollouts continue apace around the world, and the industry has set its sights on recovery, now more than ever, that recovery is going to be built on tech.
To design the tech that’s needed for the new normal, product leaders will need to challenge old ways of thinking. The idea that developers can do their work without interacting with customers, for example, is increasingly anachronistic.
Liu sees it as an issue of ownership. He explains, “what we’ve been doing is trying to hold the team together, and then trying to get them (to be) accountable for what they’re building. And naturally, when the whole team – that includes the technical person and everyone else – when you are truly supporting the ownership, you will naturally want to understand your customer and talk to them, right? Otherwise, who are you building for?”
Kua describes it as “pleasantly forcing everyone to live and breathe UX research.” Monthly showcases to share what has been learnt by talking to customers, and how numbers are backing up qualitative findings, are starting to have an impact, Kua says, continuing “we’re kind of bringing everyone in the company through the process of understand that actually it is important,” so that the teams can drive the process themselves.
This is a good time to rethink old processes; invest in automation, migrate to cloud, rebuild stacks. As Mieke de Schepper, executive vice president online travel and managing director Asia Pacific for Amadeus, puts it, “things that are super hard to do when you’re running at kind of 100 miles per hour. But as the volumes are lowered, you can do these things.”
Working on new products to bolster rebound
Firms are taking a crack at some of the big challenges they face which, if solved, could become competitive advantages.
Kua wants to revamp the way Wego handles metasearch to better support customers. Explaining that customers are bombarded with too much choice to actually find what they need, Kua is laser focused on getting customer feedback to surface these needs and be able to offer them better options.
Liu’s focus is on building an agile system that responds to these challenging times, noting “the situation [can] change very very rapidly – one market can be locked down this year, or this weekend, and next week [it] suddenly opens up right. So that flexibility; a reusable, agile system that is built per market, per stage, and it’s fully controllable by each of the local markets. … once we do that, we’ll be very very competitive.”
Accor, meanwhile, has three focal areas, says Nguyen Trieu.
First, they are building the “hotel in the cloud” – essentially migrating systems like PMS and POS systems from on-premise where they are today, to a consolidated cloud offering, alleviating the heavy costs of managing them on-premise.
For guests, it is a matter of building Accor as a platform around APIs that allow the integration of partners into the system, to create more offerings for the guests.
Finally, Accor is also re-thinking the ways their tech teams work, drawing inspiration from companies like gitlab that “are completely remote, and still able to build amazing products”, hoping to be able to create a similar environment for their teams.
Customer needs must be central to product development
In thinking about new products too, it seems customer interest is front and centre of considerations. Asked to choose between customer depth, technological depth, and commercial depth in product design, Kua said “customers will pay the bills and pay for the technology so customer trumps them all”.
Nguyen Trieu would also focus on customer depth because, “customers pull the tech and commercial.”
Klook’s Liu adds, “I think the customer is ultimately what we’re trying to serve. And then once that is done, I think the commercial and technical parts are just ways to do it sustainably, and then maybe at large scale.”
Looking ahead, product chiefs see some trends emerging around satisfying consumers.
Chan thinks that chat will win travellers over. He is interested in how chatbots can transact, for example, by responding to users’ queries about driver locations with a Google Map of the driver. There is, he believes a lot of room to grow in chatbots.
As does Kua, saying, of chat, “it’s advanced so much. And right now, people really need that connection, so definitely chat.”
With AI becoming more sophisticated, it will surface better and more tailored solutions to users, enhancing overall traveller experience. Which is why Liu believes suggestions by AI are another trend to watch.
Meanwhile Accor’s Nguyen Trieu thinks digital payments will be an essential consumer tool moving forward.
Considering that per NTT Data Corporation, after the pandemic, 78% of consumers in South and South-east Asia increased their use of digital payments, this seems a wise bet too.
As for new consumer needs, information is the order of the day. The uncertainty and state of constant flux that the pandemic has wrought has placed a new premium on information.
Regulations and restrictions can change by the day, sometimes by the hour, and customers are already overwhelmed with different sources of information. Technology that can serve up timely, accurate information that reassures travellers will go a long way to smoothing over some of these stressors.
Keeping an eye out on new tech – no-code building, AR/VR, clean tech
Beyond information, needs that have long existed are being brought to the fore.
In the absence of global travel, domestic experiences, or as Liu puts it, “things to do that [customers] didn’t use to do domestically… anything that can get them out of the house, they are searching for that.”
And in anticipation of a return to international travel, not just digital, but contactless digital payments that also alleviate foreign exchange concerns (like the Revolut App) will likely see increased interest and adoption.
Casting their gaze further ahead towards building for the future, product developers are no less ambitious.
GlobalTix’s Chan wants to see low-code/no-code building because it will enable products to be launched in the quickest time, something he believes will see massive change in the coming years.
The potential for both augmented and virtual reality to play a role in travel experiences is also an exciting one.
Says Liu, “imagine you are in another city or in your own city, and with the AR’s help which you get from your glasses or something else, while you’re doing the activities you used to do, you can see more and try to introduce more information.”
Kua on the other hand imagines “shutting everything out and just being in the zone,” with an old school VR headset. Despite being around for so long VR has never really taken off, but in a socially-distanced new normal, it does boast many use cases, especially in travel.
Increasingly leveraging tech to address issues like climate change is also key. Nguyen Trieu expects IoT and Clean Tech to come into greater play helping their hotels reach net-zero. This, he believes is super critical not just because of climate change, but because as awareness grows guests will also take these things into consideration when booking their stays.
Featured image credit: Getty Images
