NEWS TRAVEL WEEKLY BUSINESS CONTINUED FROM THE BACK
any other cost in the business. “In any fixed asset business, the more footfall you get the better your economics and your profitability. “At easyJet we had an aircraft
with, say, 184 seats flying on a certain date at a certain time. You are basically an auctioneer running an auction. So the more people you bring to that auction, the more likely you are going to increase profits. If you bring 10 more to the auction, then you have to think one in 10 are going to pay more for a seat. “If I can bring more and more people earlier to that auction, I will sell out my cheapest seats much quicker, which means my yield curves will push up and I have more time to sell my more expensive seats. “Trying to bring as much
volume as possible is important in any fixed asset business.” Dunne said eDreams several
years ago had a “very poor relationship management” and had since tried to improve that and “develop more products and services to help airlines”. Dunne described the
Barcelona-based OTA as foremost a technology company. Talking about its partnership with Google, which has its own flight search product, he added: “The world is not like it was 20 or even 50 years ago, where things are black and white, and if one company does anything in my space I won’t speak to you. “That’s an old-world mindset
that you can’t take any more. You have to be clear that you may compete in certain areas and may collaborate in other areas. “If you don’t get emotional
about it and you just look at it rationally and say they have shareholders and a business interest – and if you were them, you’d do it as well – you can figure out where it is win-win and begin to trust each other.”
TRAVEL WEEKLY BUSINESS BREAKFAST: eDreams Odigeo chief
Dunne: Automation speed often beats human touch
Customers want automated answers rather than human interaction “as long as it is done well”, according to the boss of eDreams Odigeo.
Chief executive Dana Dunne said
ultimately the customer would decide which took priority in travel retailing, but added that the speed of automation often beat the human touch. “I don’t want to force the
customer into an automated experience,” he said at a Travel Weekly Business Breakfast. “But if I can get the information quicker through an automated vehicle, my satisfaction can sometimes be a lot higher than going through menus and waiting for an agent to explain it and so on. “There are a lot of people that, as long as that automated process is done well, have a greater sense of satisfaction than if they had had a human interaction.” He stressed that putting the
customer first and providing a good product were the cornerstones of a successful travel business and
‘Lufthansa lost out with fee and other airlines benefited’
Lufthansa’s introduction of a €16 fee for GDS bookings had “no real impact” at eDreams but the retailer reported a shift in the market. The OTA’s chief executive, Dana Dunne, predicted some airlines would also opt to charge agents to buy fares through GDSs but others would not be forced to follow suit. British Airways recently announced it was to start charging
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travelweekly.co.uk 31 August 2017
“A lot of people have more satisfaction than if they had a human interaction”
warned against marketing “gim- micks” and an over-reliance on PR. Dunne defended automisation,
saying it did not detract from a customer’s choice. “One of our foundations, as fundamentally a technology company, is that we are really rich in data,” he added. “We can create
agents an £8 fee, but Dunne did not believe all its competitors would follow suit. He said: “We saw a significant
drop in our sales of Lufthansa and we saw a real increase in our sales of its competitors. So it had no real material impact on our business. “There may be a category of
airline where [charging a fee] makes sense and others where it doesn’t. “You may find other large
airlines go that way, but you may see game theory play out and other airlines going the other way, which could suddenly change the dynamics of the whole industry.”
LUFTHANSA: Imposed a €16 fee to book flights via GDSs in 2015
DANA DUNNE: ‘Higher satisfaction can be gained from automated service’
clever ways in which customers can search our data.” He said the results of machine learning had been “staggering” but it would still be “some years” before the end-to-end booking journey of a holiday or flight could be done through artificial intelligence such as chatbots. And despite confidence in
eDreams’ product, he said it needed to focus on offline channels to increase brand awareness in the UK, one of the only European markets in which one of its brands is not the leader in flight search.
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