Ai Video: Counting on headless air commerce for airline retailing

20th September, 2019 

API-led or headless commerce as a concept is being increasingly considered to offer a unified brand experience across all the touchpoints - web, voice, social platforms etc.

In such approach, commerce and content offerings are detached from the front-end and linked straight to all customer touchpoints through APIs.

Airlines, too, can focus on the same to control their respective ancillary offers, for instance, air ancillaries, by abstracting and enriching their API to support any front-end delivery, says Jonathan Newman, Chief Commercial Officer, caravelo, a Barcelona-based travel technology specialist. “Headless air commerce is about taking an airline’s product and abstracting into byte size widgets,” said Newman. “Deliver widgets ready to be embedded in any front.”

Focus here is on introducing widgets faster and ensuring a superlative experience across all the channels. Such e-commerce set up works by passing requests between the presentation and application layers through web services or API calls.

As for how to go about the same, specialists recommend evaluation of `front-end as a service’ to overcome hurdles linked with working on a custom front-end. It is being highlighted that such service paves way for experimentation for including new front-ends, learning and executing on a regular basis etc. “As an airline, if you have to re-render your seat map or recreate your booking engine for every new app, chatbot or mini-program it dramatically slows down your time to market and increases your cost and inefficiency. Instead, through headless commerce, your back-end is embedded in your front, making the deployment eminently scalable,” explained Iñaki Uriz Millan, CEO, caravelo.

For more, watch the video featuring caravelo’s CCO, Jonathan Newman