Post-election, people could be distracted, but once again, anyone in the travel business, this will very likely hurt your business, so keep on, keep on the pressure.
I think we were talking heavily about sustainability as a new driving force and obviously always employee experience, but I feel like now cost has become the number one talking point again. I see also now a question on the buyer community where they’re saying, “Okay, how can we leverage our buying power versus the more and more consolidated market structure?”
I think it was just a matter of time before it caught up. Now it’s caught up, and the question is: can the existing management team modernize and change enough while also just fixing stuff that was neglected for so long? They talk about all the money they’re investing in tech; well, yeah, it’s because they spent way too long not investing.
We talk about the joy of travel. Let’s be honest, guys. Everybody talks about the golden age of air travel; it sucked back then. What are you talking about? But the deal is this: every time I go somewhere, somebody says to me, “Did you have a nice flight?” It’s a simple question. My answer is always the same two-word answer: “We landed.” I’m not on the plane for the wine list.
United is a premium airline, not because it’s the latest fad; it’s really core to who our passengers are, what the passenger demand is, our premium business hubs, and how we operate.
How are you ensuring that that infrastructure work is actually going in a single unified direction? The most important tool is you have to have a common view of what problem you’re trying to solve. For us, our companies are united by this idea of the perfect trip. How do you enable a delightful travel experience? By the way, that vision is broad enough that anybody can contribute to it. To be fair, every one of the companies I’m in benefits by making that vision possible, so it’s in their best interest to go make that vision possible.
We have this model called “listen, act, listen.” When we merged our companies, for example, in the sales area and distribution area, we took the best of both. It was very hard, but we ended up, I would argue, with an A-team. But then we focused on the customer. We don’t get to tell them what to do; we have to find what they need and want that they value. By the way, we have a motto here at Delta and Delta sales: to stay humble and hungry.
Our ethos and our purpose is to be customer-obsessed. As a pure B2B play, we are only as good as the value that we bring to and through our customer base. We’ve driven a culture here of empowerment, innovation, and performance. As you look at the executive leadership table of Sabre, there’s not a single person at my table that was there at the start of COVID. So, culturally and in terms of the leadership ranks, it is a very different place than it was historically.