Hi, I’m Mike McCormick and I’m here with another Travel Again snapshot. I’m here with Max Vicini, who’s with Hitit, and he is the representative here for the Americas and one of my fellow panelists here at the CAPA Airline Leader Summit in Trinidad. Welcome, Max.
Good to see you, Mike, and really enjoyed the panel with you. I thought you had some terrific insights yesterday. We talked a lot about the whole ecosystem needing to be involved in the process here with modern retailing. From your perspective, you have a lot of customers in the airline community. What are you seeing, and what were your takeaways from the summit?
We are talking about more retailing, and more retailing is here to stay and evolve. In the next two or three years, I think most airlines will be working on and evolving their modern retailing strategies. We as a technology provider will follow up all that. Currently, we are part of the IATA retailing consortium. We participate now and have all the certifications for NDC, so we follow very close this evolution and this transition to offer order management mainly. In the next years, we’ll see most airline retailing capabilities implemented in many airlines. In the next five years maximum, we will reach a maturity on that side.
The next goal is to learn lessons for what didn’t work and what did work. The entire ecosystem is talking about airlines, travel agencies, and airports—everything. We have to learn from all the process and keep on supporting the industry. From our side, we are still developing dynamic pricing, ancillary dynamic pricing, and all what we already have and offer to all of our partners worldwide, but with more capabilities. This is not like putting the cart before the horse. It is not necessary to reinvent the wheel and develop new things over what we have. Our strategy is to be aligned with the other standards and continue building our offer, order, and settlement strategy over that. In the next two or three years, we will be at a more mature stage of all this transformation.
I think so too. One of the audience questions at the end was really interesting. The question was: who is more important ultimately to this process, the airline or the travel agency and distribution? Everyone on the panel said the travel agent. Sometimes it is forgotten that you’ve got a long-tail distribution and a region here where you’ve got a lot of smaller players. It’s going to take more than just an airline deciding that they want to have a direct relationship with their customer.
As I told you before and yesterday, this is an ecosystem, a total ecosystem. We are all on this in this industry. Probably the discussion is not who has to lead this transformation. I think it is the responsibility of each one of the players because the airline can push and put themselves in front of the transformation, saying we are NDC capable and our systems are capable to do it. This starts in the IT process because if the airline is not ready, it is probably because they don’t have the right IT partner to support this digital transformation.
It is like we say here in Latin America, we have an expression: who goes first, the egg or the chicken? I think it is not a thing of who is leading the transformation, but it is a shared responsibility. Here in Latin America and the Caribbean, there are some small travel agencies that are not prepared. They don’t even have API capabilities. NDC is almost based on APIs. If the small travel agency or the medium-sized travel agencies don’t have their own resources, they have to rely on an aggregator or a consolidator, a big travel agency, to handle that content.
If I have a regional airline that has a lot of small and mid-sized travel agencies as local businesses, especially in the Caribbean and some countries like Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, or Chile, this is the context of the region. We cannot say that in two or three years we will have full NDC capabilities in all the market. We will have probably the major and the biggest travel agencies and OTAs that already have NDC connections right now. We are talking about big companies in all the Americas. But for Latin America and the Caribbean, this will take a long time to be honest and realistic.
It’s all about learning lessons, continue implementing solutions, and also, as an IT provider, to educate, to transmit, and to be open to participate in this kind of events and share our current status of what we are doing and how we can help. Also through organizations like Alta—we are active Alta members too. This organization gathers all the airlines in the Caribbean, Latin America, and the entire Americas as well. That is my vision. I think Hitit will always be there for the airline and travel ecosystem to help and finally meet the goal of full NDC adoption and later on the offer, order management, and settlement capabilities.
Very good. Well, Max, again, appreciate being on the panel with you. Terrific insight and great to see you here in Trinidad.
Mike, thank you so much. Thank you. Bye.