Airlines are assessing the longer term impact of the COVID-19 crisis and whether there will be a reduction in managed business travel.
Carriers such as Lufthansa say that, while leisure trips picked up in the Summer, business travel has not come back.
During this week’s virtual World Aviation Festival, Xavier Lagardere, vice president of distribution for the Lufthansa Group, says trends brought about by the pandemic could have a lasting impact on intermediaries and suppliers.
“There’s clear uncertainty as to how our customer segments will behave going forward. We see new trends in business travel with potentially small and medium businesses coming back earlier or even businesses lowering their investment in business travel and going for solutions which resemble more online practices.”
As part of a panel on distribution and the development of IATA’s NDC standard, which also included American Airlines, ATPCO and Datalex, Lagardere adds that the general trend in the crisis is increased digitilization of its own channels.
He says that the current trends mean the airlines’ own channels are the main access point for offers and information on safety and travel restrictions.
Alison Taylor, chief customer officer at American Airlines, echoes similar trends in terms of leisure customers, more direct business and SME travelers.
She says that going forward bundles are going to become a much bigger part of the product offering for both leisure and business segments.
“For corporate travel, bundles can keep costs down, they know what is included and that is all that is going to be included.”
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The airlines and technology companies were also asked whether the crisis had acted as a catalyst for NDC.
Taylor says: “I think for some people it has the timeline in getting NDC on board. Now, not everyone has the team members they had before so there is an escalation in needing NDC because automation is more important and bundling is more important, both for information and cost containment.”
Lagardere points to progress already made by Lufthansa with NDC.
He says the airline can now service managed travel for Siemens over an NDC direct connection that is integrated with SAP Concur, Travelfusion and the front and back-office solutions of travel management companies.
Questions remain however whether small and medium sized airlines as well as intermediaries will be at a disadvantage in terms of access to content.
Jonathan Savitch, chief commercial officer, ATPCO Routehappy, believes NDC should be seen as “a journey not a destination.”
“The leader board airlines that have hacked their way through the jungle to make this work will have early adopter advantage. At an industry level it needs to be easy for smaller airlines to get on board and for small to medium sized sales channels to consume content. There should be real call to action to make that standard more easily scaled and adopted and we have not quite got there yet.”
Offering customers increased elements of self-service was also highlighted as a shift.
Blair Koch, senior vice president of customer success and delivery for Datalex, says: “Customer self-service is critical now. So even when we have NDC, one of the key things that should be there is a self-service element of that, a serviceable reservation or order could be of huge benefit to airlines going forward.”
He adds that personalization will continue to be important with airlines able to pull a lot of traffic in using personalization techniques instead of waiting for them to come via search.