Be innovative to stay relevant

The 500 participants of the World Travel Forum Lucerne gathered together last week at a time when the industry is facing its most challenging period ever, with an array of pressures that include keeping up with fast-changing digitalisation, attracting and retaining talent, the sustainability challenge and the ongoing threat of terrorism.

Over and over again, in speeches, workshops and during networking opportunities, ways to deal with current issues were discussed. In his keynote speech about Uber, General Manager of the company, Rasoul Jalali, explained that although the company has transformed urban transformation and is now used in nearly 80 countries in 500 cities, if it is to continue to prosper, it cannot now sit back and do nothing to update its offering.

With its app continually conveying details about millions of journeys, it has built up a vast wealth of data to work out ways to improve journeys and reduce traffic jams. For example, it finds peak times for demand are at bar closing times in different cities - in Stockholm, for example, that is around 2.30am. To further drive revenues, it introduced Uberpool, where you share your car with a stranger at a lower cost, and found that it was an overwhelming success.

With the inevitable march towards automation, Uber is working on introducing driverless cars, and is currently testing out the concept in Pitsburgh, U.S. - the first company to test this out commercially. In a workshop entitled, ‘What next in aviation?’, Troy Warfield, Director of Customer Experience at British Airways, said that the company now has 55m known customers on its websites, where information like their likes and dislikes are known. BA can fine tune its operations from details gleaned in this way.

Make the experience of holidaying as seamless as possible

It is constantly looking for ways to preserve its brand perception, for example by making getting a flight as seamless as possible. One way it did this recently was by introducing AirPortr last autumn, where passengers can check-in their luggage at home, have it weighed, given a tracking code and collected by the AirPortr team. The passenger then simply collects it at the destination. Warfield said that a continual challenge for BA was how to make each of its many thousands of passengers feel that they are getting personal service, and how to cater for all, when one person on a long haul flight may be spending £9000 and another £350.

Jurg Schmid, CEO of Switzerland Tourism, said that Switzerland was cool and trendy when tourism started in the country, when the British would visit the Alps in the early nineteenth century. Since then it has had to continually adapt its offering to stay ahead in its delivery of quality. Like BA, the destination tries to make the experience of holidaying there as seamless as possible.

«For example, we made it so you just have to buy one ticket for all buses boats, trams, and trains, the Swiss travel pass», said Schmid. «With hotels, we have no compromise in quality, we enforce a strict classification system. We implemented a Swiss-wide tourism quality management system and a dual-education system, so you can start as a cook and end up with a masters degree in the industry. We never stop trying to think up ways to stay relevant.»