Ai Editorial: One Single Flight Shopping System to Rule them All?

Can there be one single system that will transform flight shopping?  

The travel industry is reinventing flight shopping, and that’s a major data, technology and user experience challenge. Ai’s Ritesh Gupta interviews Routehappy’s CEO Robert Albert about flight shopping

You are searching for a flight, and there are amenities that you are specific looking for, say Wi-Fi. You also intend to make comparison of in-seat in-flight entertainment. You have also heard about the possibility of a virtual tour of the aircraft. How easily can you do all this? Airlines, OTAs and meta-search engines are trying to find ways to facilitate all this and more in our flight search. There are ample signs that we are now moving beyond price differentiation, which by its very definition is a commoditized way of comparing flights. 

If we talk of airlines, there are certain aspects that need to be taken care of. For instance, a consistent fleet type can only strengthen their brand positioning as there would be uniformity in amenities offered.

As an established OTA, Expedia is focused on ensuring its visitors know what exactly is included in certain flight prices at the time of purchase, and allowing them to opt for a ticket with the specific attributes and on-board services. Exploring premium seating options via the online seat map is an example.

Then there are other bigwigs like Google collaborating with airlines to pave way for a real insight into what an aircraft looks like. For example, one can count on the blend of Google Maps and search to check “Virgin America, LAX” for virtual tour of its aircraft.  

Level of differentiation

The term differentiation gets tossed around a lot in the travel sector. So how are various entities going about flight search?

“Differentiation is the theme in flight shopping. Airlines have differentiated their products comprehensively, including fare types, hard product, and services. Flight shopping channels (direct and indirect) are catching up to display the differentiators,” says Robert Albert, CEO, Routehappy, a company that helps airlines to deliver their product attributes wherever flights are sold. The company has been in news for signing a spate of agreements this year, latest being the one with Kayak.

So is there any barometer for product differentiation?

Albert says airlines are at something like “5-15% of their differentiation potential in their own channels” overall, and closer to “0-5% in indirect channels”.

He referred to Delta, Air Berlin and Lufthansa as worthy examples of major airline direct channels that are increasingly differentiating products in their own channels. “Expedia, Google and Travelport are leading the pack in indirect at the moment, with everyone else (GDS, OTA, meta, OBT) working on their differentiation strategies. Fare and product attributes need to be presented in a way that is easy to understand, digest, compare and personalize. Our industry is reinventing flight shopping, and that’s a major data, technology and UX (user experience) challenge,” explained Albert.

Knowing about amenities that I am looking for

Keeping aside standard amenities or something can be chosen from options on a site, there is a possibility that one would want to know about certain aspect of a flight. Let’s say, I am fond of chocolate mousse and tennis. I am flying from London to New York and if I were to search for “chocolate mousse tennis London New York flight” – how quickly one would be able to find relevant info on an airline.com site?

Albert says the first question to ask is when you can consistently search for the basics: flights with Wi-Fi, power ports, seatback entertainment, fresh food, lie flat seats, specific aircraft, baggage, upgradeability, lounge access, etc. He says it’s a combination of providing better information when consumers are searching for flights in general, but also helping airlines and consumers understand product attributes in up-sell offerings.
“Once we achieve that, then airlines and distributors can focus on more nuanced personalization like what kind of food or entertainment offerings are available. As an industry, we need to build our new foundation first. The next few years will be focused on basics of a richer shopping experience. After that you might be able to find flights that serve chocolate mousse and show tennis matches on the seatback,” shared Albert.

Continuing with the above example, when I searched for “chocolate mousse tennis London New York flight” on Google UK, there was an old media review of Thomson’s Dreamliner long-haul flight from the UK and featured a comment about chocolate mousse too. It was ranked eighth, but was closest to relevancy. So  would search engines/ meta-search sites be the best options?

“We believe the industry needs a standard, trusted, fair, and transparent scoring system based on facts first, which can then be personalized,” said Albert. His team built the Routehappy Scores & Amenities API to accomplish this goal — a baseline scoring system by flight and cabin that rates the most important aspects of the experience: aircraft, seat, amenities, and duration compared to the fastest option on any route. Once airlines and consumers no longer have to wade through 100s of flight options and instead can focus on the best options for their trip, airlines and distributors can then provide more information to help flyers pick the best possible product for themselves.

Avoid being generic, inconsistent

It is important to assess whether airlines are overlooking mistakes they are committing when it comes to overshadowing their own product attributes on their brand websites. Albert says it needs to be understood that this is a very hard problem to solve.  “…so I commend all airlines that are enriching the flight shopping experience with differentiation content. Everyone needs to learn what works best for their own website, customer base, airline products, etc.” He added, “Having said that, the major issues I see on airline websites is overly generic or inconsistent presentation of product attributes. By generic, I mean information is presented in too general of a way to be truly useful to a consumer’s decision process or it’s not presented in the decision flow. By inconsistent, I mean information is presented inconsistently so it doesn’t reinforce usefulness, importance, comparability, or accuracy of the product attributes.” 

Data + content + tools

Airlines need to capitalize on data, and content, and make use of tools to stand out with a differentiated offering.

“We built Routehappy Hub to help airlines and distributors do exactly this — a standard platform for airlines to create, manage and deliver their rich product attribute content in any channel they sell or display flights. At the core is our rich content standard, UPA (Universal Product Attribute),” said Albert. This standard combines descriptive and visual content targeted by aircraft, cabin, flight, airport, fare, segment, channel and other criteria, for display in any channel. “Think UPC or SKU but for air travel. We currently have a dozen major airlines creating their UPAs in Routehappy Hub and sharing it for previews, testing and live pilots with major OTAs, metas, GDSs and their own channels,” shared Albert. 

So how to innovate flight shopping with differentiated, personalized content?

Solving this very large problem requires three things:

• A common technology platform and pipes the industry can share (Routehappy Hub)
• High quality, targeted product content from airlines (airlines creating UPAs in Routehappy Hub).
• Product content displays intelligently in flight search results — amenity icons, photo slideshows, product attribute grids, filters, recommendations, upsell offers, etc that are integrated in a way consumers find useful and easy.

Airlines are creating their standard UPA content and sharing it with major distributors and tech platforms for integration.

Cohesive approach

A cohesive approach is needed from the industry to pave way for differentiation.

As Albert mentioned, common platforms and standards are critical for the industry to de-commoditize.

He also stated that organizations like Farelogix, Sojern, Adara, Travelport, Amadeus, Sabre, ATPCO, IATA etc. are all addressing different aspects of the differentiation merchandising opportunity, each with a healthy respect for common platform and standards.

As a rich product attribute content platform, Routehappy Hub is for delivery in any device or touch point.

“Our platform can easily be integrated with other platforms that are responsible for other aspects of merchandising innovation — such as revenue management systems and dynamic merchandising offers. That means that amenity and product data can be integrated into other tools airlines use to inform prices and offers — and then that same product information can be integrated for display to consumers. Each platform needs to do what it does best. There’s no single system that will transform flight shopping itself. It’s a cooperative, worldwide business and technology undertaking,” he says.

Finding the best ways to integrate differentiation content will be a theme in flight shopping for years to come.  

Airlines, distributors, and technology partners need to come together to adopt common platforms and standards to make airline merchandising as good as it is in other industries — and it’s happening.

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