Shearwater Blog

Parts 1 and 2 from this series of posts may already be too much Amadeus for some readers, but I promise that today’s post is the last set of conference photos for a while…  well maybe only until after the FFP ARAC event in LA in a couple of weeks. Speaking of conferences, that one conflicts with one I would have loved to attend – The Web in Travel conference in Singapore. If you’ve got 18 minutes and 52 seconds spare, click on the pre-conference podcasts and listen to Tim Hughes, as he really does have a much better insight on the internet and social media in travel than most people doing the speaking circut these days. A very entertaining  and insightful guy, but I would say that! And if neither of those two upcoming conferences grab you, a third conference happening at the same time is the Adventure Travel World Summit in Quebec City. Is there any reason to remain in the office that week?

The photos I’ve uploaded today are from the last day of the e-commerce conference. Once all of the presentations were finished, busses arrived and took us from Cannes to Juan Les Pins to play pétanque. Beautiful weather and a great way to interact with customers and prospects in a more informal setting – if you want to see just how informal, that is me in the shorts!

That final photo is Derek from American Airlines taking a drink of some liquid that looks like something I wouldn’t go near handling without wearing rubber gloves. He is standing next to conference organizer Armelle Carlier. I suppose after successfully organizing what was undoubtedly the best conference of the past few years (with the help of a good team of course), she is entitled to take a drink of whatever she pleases!

I promised to find some more photos of the recent Amadeus e-Commerce customer conference in Cannes, so here they are. This will be the second of a three part series, and then I’ll try to return to less self indulgent posts. Below you’ll spot Lawrence from Cathay Pacific, Hazem from Saudi, Elvis from Tarom and Javier from Iberia all enjoying a break from the conference presentations that took place during the first few days of October.

Only in the last 12 hours did I see the fresh off the presses aggregated customer feedback results. At the end of each day customers are asked to score each of the presentations along with other questions on their feedback forms. In Kuala Lumpur my presentation was rated best over the two days of that conference, but this time I had to settle for the middle of the pack. No way I could compete with Denis and his technology presentation which always goes down a treat with customers. Personally my pick for the best presentation went to Agnieszka above for her talk on Affinity Shopper, but clearly when there is this much competition for top spot, it is the airline delegates in attendance who really benefit.

Above photo is of Pascale Gamby and Gaby Badlou from Air Caraibes accepting their award that was officially called Highest Ancillary Revenue Attach Rate. What this really means is that they sell a ton of insurance on their website. Congratulations, as of all the awards, this is definintely one of the better ones to win. With so many airlines struggling to realize the full potential of ancillary revenue, it is great to see Air Caraibes really kicking some goals with insurance.

I’ll probably do a second installment of photos soon as it really was a very good conference.  I went so far the other day as to say it was the best conference I had been to (including both internal and external events) since joining Amadeus in 2005. Almost 150 airline delegates, and almost all of them specialists in e-commerce. Some great presentations over two days (Affinity Shopper seemed to be the hot topic most airlines were interested in hearing about – this product was hinted at last year, but this time a live site was shown)

In fact it is rare that I write such a positive pro-Amadeus post, as normally I prefer to avoid mentioning my employer too much, but lately I’ve seen announcements of new GDS functionality launched that also looks very interesting for direct channels. One I saw today was Happy Hours for Negotiated Fares, and the other day I saw Baggage supersize (new SSR: SRXBAG-30KG) which allows pre-paying for excess baggage by the kilo. If I keep up this line of writing, I might have to look for a job in the marketing department!

Back to the conference last week in Cannes. I haven’t labelled the individual photos, but see how many of the following people you can pick out (well, maybe not from the first photo shown!). If you look hard enough from the second photo on, you will see (in no particular order) Jeff and Warren from V Australia, Meny from El Al, Guido and Edwin from AF-KLM, Gwen and Daragh from CityJet, Karianne, Hans Petter and Odd from Wideroe (accepting award for best look to book ratio), Blas from Mexicana, Jerome from Corsair, and others I have not mentioned by name.  

So much fun, but a lot of good business conducted at the same time. If I haven’t convinced you that this is the one conference where you really want to get onto the invite list for next year, then I’ll have to try harder later this week when I get my hands on a few more photos to publish.

I don’t actually believe for a second that the answer to the headline I wrote is ‘yes’ as I’m still seeing so many airlines not understanding how to correctly apply the bow tie model to the way they sell certain ancillary items. This is a proven way to increase revenue from hotels; but it is clear that in certain categories of ancillary revenue, the sky is not all blue. 

Here is the statistic of the week, if not the month, from Portfolio. “But here’s an indisputable truth: The more baggage fees that the big airlines pile on their customers, the faster their overall revenue is collapsing. In fact, the only carriers that escaped a double-digit revenue decline in the second quarter were the two that still allow all passengers to check at least one bag for free.”

And then a quote from Flight Global. “Row 44′s announcement comes at a time when a growing number of industry stakeholders are questioning the viability of fee-for-service models for in-flight Internet.”

And thirdly, you have the article at Aviation Week from the recent LCC conference in Barcelona where a number of carriers are expressing concern over the growth potential of ancillary revenue.

Three different sources in less than a week echoing the same theme makes me wonder if the buzz is fading from the buzzword (well, two words really) that is ancillary revenue. When I was presenting last week at the Amadeus Airline e-Commerce customer conference in Cannes I made the point about how when I joined the company in 2005 meta-search was the hot topic everyone wanted to talk about, then dynamic packaging took over for a while, now it is ancillary revenue, but what will be the next “flavour of the month” buzzword to get backsides on seats at industry conferences? Maybe social media, but the jury is definitely still out on that one. Speaking of the Amadeus conference in Cannes, I know I’m not seen as that impartial, but it really was the best airline conference I have ever attended. I’m trying to get permission to publish some of the photos taken by the official photographer, and I’ll definintely be writing more about this conference in the coming days.

I wrote this post over a week ago, but just realised I never actually uploaded it to the blog. Therefore some of you have probably already seen the story I’ve linked to. It is an amusing start to the week if you haven’t seen it:

Read the following from England’s Telegraph newpaper.

A Greater Manchester Police spokesperson said: “Shortly after 7.35am on Saturday police were called to the check-in area at Terminal One, following reports that a man was being abusive to staff.

“Officers attended and warned the man about his future conduct and behaviour under the Public Order Act.”

The spokesperson added that the man had admitted to officers that he had been “unprofessional and irate” but he had quickly calmed down so no further action had been necessary.

Do you think they are talking about an irate passenger being charged for excess luggage? If so, you would be wrong.

Philip Meeson, boss of budget airline Jet2.com, was warned by police after flying into a rage at his own staff after becoming annoyed at the length of time it was taking them to deal with a long queue of passengers.

I suppose when you are an LCC in a market where customers are used to the antics of Ryanair, sometimes in the PR wars you have to fight fire with fire. No idea if this story on Jet2 is a PR plant or totally unintended, but I doubt Philip Meeson is unhappy about it one little bit, as it really gives a strong message that this airline CEO is serious about customer service.