Issue 4 - November 2020

“The best way to predict your future is to create it.” ― Peter Drucker

This isn’t another letter about collaboration in pursuit of lofty changes. Instead, I want us to think about bite-sized objectives with near-term impact. We’re all being asked to do more with less, so the question is: what can we do now and how will we determine success?

The answer may be “affordable innovation,” as one industry veteran put it during our recent summit on the new reality of flight shopping. Over 700 registrants from 300 organizations—airlines, systems, and channels—converged on an actionable approach:

1. First, demand stimulation needs to address top-of-mind issues like health & safety, COVID-19 testing, insurance, flexibility, and more. While retailing is still about tailored experiences for flight shoppers, new shopping attributes are now required: “We want everyone to think that air travel is safe, and it’s better if airlines are competing on [attributes] other than safety,” said Piero Sierra at Skyscanner. 
   
   
2. Second, new relevant offers require us to message products differently than we have before. Seats remain a big element of consumer choice, but rather than comfort, you may be marketing “empty adjoining” for peace of mind. Likewise, self-check-in and baggage drop, as well as longer and more flexible rebooking options, resonate differently with flight shoppers now: “There’s never been a better time to make sure we’re equipping passengers with the ability to choose for themselves what they value and what they’ll pay for,” concluded Chris Engle of Plusgrade.
   
   
3. Third, and most important, agility is the key to navigating the path to recovery. We must all shift our mindset toward affordable innovation by leveraging the whole industry to design minimum viable projects that work for the most relevant and impactful use cases. This isn’t to say our long-term objectives no longer matter, rather the question must be “how do I start now, today?” As LATAM’s Rosario Phillips put it, “The world is slowing down and becoming a lower-risk laboratory, so we can test and accelerate all the things that we have been wanting and waited to do in the last years.”

It’s not time for us to stop and entrench—rather, to focus on the smaller opportunities in front of us. In the end, the smaller wins add up to industry impact.

Jonathan Savitch

Chief Commercial Officer, ATPCO

P.S. This issue of The Foundation will take you 3 minutes to read and you'll learn about:

• Top 3 industry themes for the new reality
• Structured UPAs making safety easier to integrate into shopping displays
• Rapid Fare Update helping pricing teams get more done faster
• The 5 most referenced ATPCO standards you should know

Demand stimulation, creating relevant offers, and agile innovation. These are the three themes industry partners are focusing on right now in our new reality. If we use this time to shift mindsets to facilitate affordable innovation by leveraging our partners, we can strategize new ways to boost traveler confidence.

You spoke, we listened. To help you drive demand, we created Structured UPAs, a standardized version of data that can be easily integrated into any shopping display as a complement to Reassurance UPAs, covering five essential topics: cleaning, masks, temperature checks, blocked seats, and capacity. 

Our teams are shrinking and we need to do more with less. This reduction in experience and invaluable knowledge is accelerating a demand from airlines for more automation and intuitive tools. Get advice on how you can make agility a key strategy to help drive innovation that matters for near-team solutions.

How do travel agents and airlines know how much to refund or charge someone when a flight is cancelled? How do 400+ airlines, 10+ GDSs, and hundreds of websites produce consistent answers to flight shopping searches? Through ATPCO standards.  A new series of iconography of the most referenced standards is helping ATPCO make understanding standards easier for everyone.

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