Issue 6 - April 2021

"If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine; it is lethal." ― Paulo Coelho

This month’s Foundation will be a bit more verbose than most, because after 20+ years in aviation and travel, I’ve decided to take a break and focus on the non-profit sector. It has been the joy of my professional life working with you all, and I’m immensely grateful for our collaboration and all that I've learned working with cockpit and cabin products, Satcom connectivity, ground services, and of course, airline pricing and retailing.

• In 2000 I was working on aircraft development; both the A380 and B787 were still very much “on the drawing board.” The major aircraft manufacturers were considering a wide range of options but had one common objective: make their respective fleets customizable for passengers while preserving operations for airlines. That principle also guided us through 9/11: our industry rallied as we invented a new reality around security. Seemingly overnight, we adjusted check-in, baggage, cabin, and airport experiences for a new era. My take-away from that time: innovation and interoperability must work in concert.  

• By 2010 those new aircraft were hitting the market with a range of new airline products and cabin technologies. On one end of the spectrum, major brands were evolving the passenger experience with multiple screens, live TV, showers, and gourmet meals. On the other end, airlines turned aircraft into billboards, increased cabin density, and included nothing—I mean nothing—in their base fare. But those new entrants opened new markets—their flights were filled with new travelers. My take-away from that time: there’s more than one way to get there.
  
  
• But all that product innovation came at a cost—shopping displays couldn’t keep up with airline offerings, so flyers didn’t know what to expect for a given flight. At that time, I was selling in-flight entertainment and Wi-Fi systems, both of which seemed to proliferate overnight. Do you remember boarding a flight and being gob-smacked that it was newly or recently retrofitted? Travelers got so confused by the experience, it was once famously decried as a soul-crushing time suck. Yikes. Those multi-million-dollar investments never showed up where it mattered most: at the point of sale. My take-away from that time: perception and reality are two different things; do everything possible to bridge the gap.
  
  
• For the first time in my life in 2015, I applied to a job via LinkedIn. I had just wrapped up a major inflight connectivity campaign and came across this NYC start-up aiming to “modernize flight shopping.” Routehappy’s ambition matched an obvious market need: sell air travel with the same smarts and rich content as everything else people buy online. I quickly fell in love with both the vision and the team. My wife affectionately referred to us as the “island of misfit toys” and I don’t recall a single Routehappy employee being even vaguely offended by that moniker. We made an infinite number of product and business model tweaks with a very finite number of resources. Our proposition was simple: improve the flight shopping experience with consumer grade rich content and someone will pay for it. My take-away from that time: embrace complexity with simple solutions.
  
  
• Industry solutions require industry reach and there was simply no way that island could serve the world on its own. ATPCO acquired Routehappy in 2018 and has been my home ever since. The fit was apparent—it’s a joyful collection of smart, humble #avgeeks, individually and collectively motivated by industry impact. Our biggest fight? Teams vs. Slack. A reinvigorated mission, a new tagline, and an integrated retailing, marketing, sales and account management org all hit the ground running immediately. We exceeded our adoption goals in year one, launched a new pricing suite in year two, and helped weather the newest crisis with reassurance content in year three.
  
  At any given moment there’s about half a million people in the air and roughly six million people traveling per day. Day in and day out, this happens at 99% reliability across massive variations in technology, regulation, and infrastructure. The logistics of all that are mind-boggling, but there’s one single ingredient to such success: interoperability. It’s not just that these systems connect with each other, it’s that they work across countries, aircraft, Wi-Fi providers, departure control systems, baggage systems, revenue and tax settlement, availability systems and more. 
  
  People are often told to “follow their passion,” but I don’t think that’s quite right. I wasn’t drawn to the complexity of our industry, in fact I had to learn to love it. Figuring it out—foundationally, humbly and with a friendly-but-ruthless focus on solutions has been the work of my life. So, my last take-away: whatever you do, do intensely.

Alex has recently provided me with this resonating nugget: people are drawn to air travel and [I’ll] be back. I think he’s right. In the meantime, please do stay in touch! 

With fondness and affection,

Jonathan Savitch

Chief Commercial Officer, ATPCO

P.S. The team is hard at work planning for Elevate this year and we need your help. Take this 2-minute survey and let us know how you plan to attend events in 2021.

If we learned anything during the last year, it’s that the airline industry must be able to adapt quickly and efficiently. This forced us to explore how delivering the right industry standards fast could accomplish change, and the answer seemed easy: “Let’s be innovative and agile”. But is it possible for industry standards development to be innovative and agile at the same time?

If you weren't one of the 300+ attendees at the first Foundation Industry Stand-Up in February, you missed out. But don't worry, you can still check out the recap and sign up for the next Foundation Industry Stand-up happening on 20 April! This 45-minute session will feature a C-Suite corner hosted by Alex Zoghlin, President and CEO of ATPCO, along with Eduardo Yanez, Pricing Manager at LATAM, as he covers their approach to working with tools that grow with them.

What did you think of The Foundation?

Share your feedback about our content.