At its annual partner airline event, Amadeus unveiled its latest announcement – Air France-KLM is now the fourth client to come onboard for Nevio.
While the airline group joins British Airways, Finnair and Saudia carriers, pushing forward the innovation demand for such a solution, internally teams had to bring expertise together so that a power move like bringing this solution to market was possible.
The European-founded travel technology firm has to balance the extremely fine of investment into the new offering – Nevio, which simplifies the process of Offer and Order Management for settlement and delivery ease – with keeping its PSS solution, Altéa, ticking along and meeting the standards of its dozens of other airline customers.
Between the Altéa and Nevio teams juggling act, it also requires input from other teams. Delivery management is a fundamental part of this new frontier of airline retailing. Pulled into the equation due to its integral nature for successful transformation.
The man heading up the charge from a delivery standpoint is Stephan Hirmer, head of end-to-end passenger servicing for airports and airlines operations.
“Delivery management is the piece which will bring it all together,” he says.
The need is born from the disconnect between the handover from a Passenger Service System (PSS) to the Departure Control System (DCS) which can cause constraints.
Constraints that “we get rid of”, says Hirmer, as the teams work together to see airlines have a turbulent-free journey to modern retailing.
Its these “legacy concepts around PNR, tickets, EMDS, and so on” that call for the ability to offer continuity of retailing by airlines.
His team’s work now sees airlines have the capability to be able to retail to passengers, the right offer at the right time to the right person in the right context not only during the booking process but now also past check-in to boarding and arrival in the final destination, which Hirmer says is a “big change from the current state of Altéa”.
Intent on being the most informed, the team looked outwardly to gain full understanding.
It set up the Delivery Management Champions group (DMX) which sees it pull expertise, opinions and advice from airlines, airports and group handlers from across the globe to discuss what the future of delivery should look like.
Off the back of this effort, the collective were able to produce a white paper on what it should look like such as retiring the check-in and travel document checks at the airport; retiring the DCS window and the push for delivery to become traveller centric to be able to align products and services based on that customer’s unique journey context, for say, special assistance.
Disruption management as a part of that experience goes in tandem with delivery management and will also see improvements as this transformation goes on to play a role in the ultimate seamless traveller experience.
The first pillar of retail transformation though is NDC, says Maher Koubaa, executive vice president, travel unit and managing director, EMEA.
In order to continue to transform the industry, he believes the process needs industrialising and scaling, which he says is a phase we are now in.
That and the fact IATA has been pushing the new standard, and the AI-era is very much upon us.
AI being an enabler for retailing’s transformation as it will be “embedded all the way through to delivery”.
The way Koubaa sees it, the two are not separate: “AI will be an enabler for the Offer and Order Management and, really, the transformation of the industry.”
It’s hoped that having an “industry shaper” such as Air France-KLM join the pan European-Middle Eastern mix of customers will help with create a snowball like effect among other carriers.
“Hopefully it will help us create a momentum in the industry to move to that new world of retailing,” hoping that the selection of solutions and systems will speak for itself.
“The scope that we have contracted with AirFrance-KLM proves the fact that our offering with Nevio is fully modular, is fully flexible and is about giving the control and the flexibility on when and how they’re going to be taking their retailing transformation.”
