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Gordon Wilson, the President and CEO of Travelport (NYSE:TVPT), the leading travel commerce platform, today highlighted the developments in technology shaping the travel industry.http://www.tourismthailand.org/landing/landing_en.html

Speaking in Atlanta at The Beat Live, Mr Wilson cited the progress made already in enabling airlines to merchandise their content to travel agency and corporate travel channels, the speed at which new airline products can be introduced – often at the same time in these channels as in the airline direct-selling channel – and the capabilities allowing airlines to make personalized or tailored offers.

Mr Wilson also spoke about how indirect channels are embracing IATA’s New Distribution Capability (NDC) API.

He announced that Travelport is on schedule to launch its first version of this capability into a production environment this quarter.

Mr Wilson expressed caution about NDC on issues such as the relative speed of connections compared to the indirect channel and the different interpretations among airlines of the NDC API. This, he said, is pushing up cost to serve and time to implement compared to the proclaimed standards. Further challenges lie in the unresolved commercial models on which industry needs to agree.

In his Keynote address at the event, Mr Wilson also highlighted the growing significance of four key technologies shaping global industrial and commercial practices and travel in particular:

  • Mobile: In the next few years he expected some 70% of the transactions Travelport processes to originate in mobile apps. Commenting on the tenth anniversary of the first airline app, he pointed to Easyjet’s new “Look & Book” app function, developed with Travelport, as an example of forward-thinking by connecting Instagram images to its booking tool.
  • Artificial Intelligence: Travelport is reducing the number of transactions sent to airlines for seat inventory by learning and predicting the rate of decay in their inventory counts. Wilson said this could lead to a reduction in messaging to airline systems of 50-80% leading to lower costs and improvement in speed
  • Robotics: Wilson predicted that 70% of mobile transactions would be untouched by human beings, including for changes or additions, as robotics would handle a significant proportion of voice traffic generated to travel agencies today.  He cited Travelport’s own Agency Efficiency Suite which is a cloud-based eventing engine capable of launching multiple robotic automation of tasks that frees travel agencies up to focus on more value-add activities
  • Data and analytics: stating that data only has value when properly analysed and acted on, he went on to say that one of the world’s foremost proponents on the data revolution, IBM, has itself crated a travel management tool with Travelport that uses artificial intelligence, provides cognitive computing, predictive data analytics using “what-if” type scenarios and integrated travel and expense data.

Mr Wilson congratulated the industry on its progress so far, but counselled this must continue. He concluded with a vote of confidence in the sector saying: “As long as we are moving forward and at a respectable speed and momentum, we will be on the right path to being able to deliver something better than today for the traveller.”