Gavin Eccles: Insights from BOOST Innovation Conference

Gavin Eccles, Head of the Aviation and Airports vertical within BAE Ventures, moderated a panel at the recent BOOST Innovation Conference held in Porto, Portugal. BOOST is all about supporting new innovative projects in the travel and tourism sector and brought some key organisations and institutions to discuss the way forward.

During an hour, key personnel from Lufthansa, ANA/Vinci Airports and Google discussed how travel in the future needs to be more aligned and customer focused, ensuring that the travel experience is enhanced and more seamless in the transition from thinking, booking, travelling and arriving…

Lufthansa, through their Innovation hub, explained that they are working with key start-up companies to understand the journey flow, and to highlight the journey touch points that cause travellers to feel anxious, and, understand what is needed to reduce such pain points. This was backed up well with commentary from ANA/Vinci, one of the World’s leading airport operating companies. Investments in biometrics, scanning and queue management are all being looked at as a way to ensure that travellers not only feel that the journey through the airport is improved, but also, to ensure how to better communicate when things are not as they should be, or, challenges ahead. The power of keeping the traveller informed was clear.

Google provided key insights on travellers, and, their search habits. Following the pandemic, travel, and, destinations were witnessing the ‘revenge-travel’ experience – we just need to get away. However, that is changing, and, lead-times from search to booking are becoming wider-again, which, has impacts for the airline and airports sector in their operational planning. And, this led to key discussion on how airlines and airports can work better to share data, and better alignment of what is happening today and tomorrow.

Overall, travel is certainly changing, and the use of data and technologies that allow for airlines to be more in line with how passengers are seeing their experience is key. There is a feeling that airlines have been slow to adapt, and, the role of an innovation hub in an airline is a true testament to the fact that they need to think differently. Lufthansa made it clear that the hub is for the better of the industry and the traveller, not merely to improve its internal operations. Sharing the development across the sector is a great way that such open innovation is developing a better travel sector.

by Gavin Eccles