The future of product will be codeless, commoditised, accelerated but ultimately human?
To ride out the long winter that’s coming, Wego is launching a brand new e-commerce business outside travel, Ross Veitch, CEO and co-founder disclosed yesterday at Day 3: Rebuild of the WiT Experience Week.
At the start of the pandemic Veitch had declared his company, which has bases in Singapore and Dubai, would innovate itself out of the crisis. Putting his money where his mouth is, he said Wego has decided to invest in a new brand, yet to be named. It will be based on platforms such as Rakuten and Shopback – the cash back model.
“The new brand will exist within the Wego app as part of our loyalty solution,” he said. “We have pulled people onto the project, leveraged expertise and talent across the organisation. If travel recovery drags on, we can ride on ecommerce recovery.”
Prodded for details on the launch by moderator Mario Jobbe, CEO of Interval 3, he said, “We are cranking out versions before the big shopping season.”
Veitch was speaking on a “Products Take Centrestage” panel with other product chiefs, Paulina Klotzbucher, chief commercial officer, Travelstart, Chan Chee Chong, CEO, GlobalTix and Rajnish Kumar, co-founder and CTO, Ixigo.
Veith said that in travel, Wego had built products to meet direct needs of travellers such as aggregation of information and staycation options. “We’ve gone from inspiration to information – revenues collapsed to zero in March.”
On GlobalTix part, Chan said the company let go of sales and operations staff and hired more tech personnel and focused on three areas – enhanced capacity management with time-based features, everything contactless from payments to redemption and facial recognition, and partnerships with domestic channels such as Grab mall so its customers could sell to locals.
At Travelstart, Klotzbucher said the company fast-tracked the integration of Club Travel, a corporate travel business it acquired last year. “We merged the back office very quickly, something that usually takes a long time was done in months.”
During the days of zero transactions, Kumar said Ixigo built more engagement to get people to stay with the app. It build a Covid Centre, insurance, online doctors and many other features. “On hindsight, we could have spent our time on other things,” he said with a smile.
It worked on its back end experience tools and revamped its chatbot – Tara Version 2 now handles 90% of chat.
It created a customer experience dashboard to give a single view to provide customer support and built Ixigo Assure to offer full refunds to customers. “This was built with a mix of fintech and data science and we learnt a lot.”
The crisis also made these chiefs think differently about product. Klotzbucher said, “We changed the way we were doing things. We had planned a tech stack launch for Club Travel and delayed it. We stopped marketing and all those crazy ideas, became a lot more ROI-focused.”
Veitch said Wego restructured its product roadmap to have more domestic focus and, for the first time in a decade, it saw more hotel revenues than flight revenues. GlobalTix switched focus from distribution to ticketless solutions.
As for what products they are watching, Chan called out live streaming which is “going to be huge” – not just travel, but shopping. “Live streaming is going to take on new life.”
Kumar cited online collaborative tools and gaming, live streaming as well as alternative accommodation.
Veitch said companies to watch would be Amazon and Netflix with their subscription models and wondered if airlines would offer unlimited flights for a fee, and he also cited online investments, contactless payments and logistics.
Klotzbucher said loyalty was hard to achieve in a low-frequency product like travel unless it was combined with lots of other things. In Ixigo’s Kumar said anyone who does it successfully would lead the way, perhaps challenging Veitch?
Klotzbucher Travelstart is building up for the B2B space as well as subscription-based products especially when it saw how fast its Nightsbridge business recovered. Nightsbridge offers tech solutions for smaller accommodation such as bed and breakfast, boutique hotels, self-catering and guest houses.
As for how they see product in 2030:
Chan: Codeless – we don’t need to learn to code.
Kumar: Commoditised and customer-centric.
Veitch: Super accelerated
Klotzbucker: AI and data analytics
Later in the day, a talk on “Back To The Future” by travel tech evangelists Timothy O’Neil-Dunne, principal 777 Partners, and Johnny Thorsen, vice president, strategy & innovation, Digital Labs at American Express, painted a world where:
• Identity and safety will be accelerated – our profile, wallet and health becomes our passport, digital and verifiable
• There will be more data, a smaller industry and a time to clean up legacy
• Real estate assets such as airports, offices and hotels will be repurposed
• There will be more subscription models (for example, CitizenM’s latest offering although Thorsen said it was too complicated but is a good signal).
• Maybe we will fly now, pay later – “why can’t we fly first, and pay the airline later direct without having to go through third parties,” asked Thorsen.
• There will be more virtual trips – for example, Amazon just launched virtual tours and activities and Klook launched Klook Live
As for their words to describe Product 2030, Thorsen said “Intuitive” and O’Neil-Dunne said, “Human.”
Underneath all that tech, the human heart beats.
Onwards to Rewrite today as we bring WiT Experience Week to Season Finale today on a hybrid stage at Marina Bay Sands, our home for the last eight years.
