Paul Revel talks to Airplus International managing director Yael Klein
Yael Klein
Yael Klein is the London-based managing director of Airplus International (UK), provider of global business travel payment solutions. She has an extensive travel background and experience of the travel payment industry, having worked at Airplus International for over 12 years. Prior to her current role, she worked as a consultant and an international key account manager, specialising in global sales. She has a degree in international tourism.
CONTROL IS THE KEY WORD for 2013, according to Yael Klein – whether it’s using virtual cards or changing the way businesses use their data. She says control is the reason why 2012 saw more people embrace the virtual card. “They have been around for a while – we launched our virtual card solution six or seven years ago,” she says. “But now people are understanding more about what you can do with the product.” Klein, who’s been with Airplus for more than 12 years and its UK managing director for the last six, thinks the growth of virtual cards will continue during 2012. “It’s a way of controlling costs again. For a long time we had a UK market that issued plastic to everyone. Everyone travelled around paying on plastic, and then you looked at the data and tried to control spend. With the new cards you can set the budget and what merchants it can be used with – it gives the corporate options to control spend even more. We’ve seen this with the government.” “I think in this day and age when
people want to save money and are looking for more control, we’ll see more use of these cards.
the whole card market, and Airplus needed new directions to grow, moving into other sectors and starting to go global at the end of the 1990s.
Klein herself went global at an early age. She was born in Germany but grew up in Kenya, before returning to study tourism and business in Heidelberg. After graduating, her career took her to various destinations, including a stint in Singapore. She’s been based in London for the last seven years. Klein says that, internationally,
Airplus’s main competitors today are American Express and Citibank. “Only three providers are truly global,” she says. “But on a local level I wouldn’t have enough fingers to list them – and the UK is one of the most competitive markets we operate in.” However, she says she welcomes the competition. “We’ve seen quite a few new kids on the block, especially in the virtual card arena. They can be fast, flexible outlets and they keep us on our toes. “I think this is a good thing, not when people come in and try and buy market share – which rocks the market and ruins it for
We’ve seen quite a few new kids on the block, especially in the virtual card arena, and they keep us on our toes – I think this is a good thing
It’s a trend going back to lodge cards, effectively – though no one will say it like that because ‘lodge’ sounds like an old-fashioned beast. It’s lodge with more technology attached to it.”
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HIGH MARKET SHARE Launched on the Universal Air Travel Plan (UATP) platform, Airplus was born in 1989 as a subsidiary of Lufthansa. “They wanted a solution that linked Lufthansa’s net rate programme to corporate payments,” says Klein. “It was great for Airplus as a start-up, because the only way you could get net rates with Lufthansa was with an Airplus card. In a very short time frame we had a very high market share.” Once Airplus became independent from Lufthansa those net rates were rapidly opened up to
a while – but as competitive new ideas which get you thinking. That’s always good. Some of these entrants will stay in the market and some will leave – that’s just the normal process.” So how does Airplus stand its
ground amid fierce competition? “We can differentiate because travel payment is all we do – it’s the only thing we have to do and have to do well. If we don’t, we’re out of a job. Every morning more than 1,000 people get out of bed and think about nothing but travel payment and how we can improve it.” She says the competitive environment helps drive innovation at Airplus, and cites the launch, at the end of last year, of a car rental account that enables more efficiencies for customers, including VAT-able