He got burnt badly at a beach party in Koh Tao, Thailand, was told he’d never walk again and ended up climbing several mountains including Everest and walking across the Antarctica. Colin O’Brady opened Expedia Group’s Explore ’19 conference in Las Vegas this morning by asking delegates, “What’s your Everest?” as he spoke about setting goals and never quitting.
Well, Expedia has set its own “Everest” to deliver what it calls a “frictionless travel experience” – similar, I suppose, to “the connected trip” that every travel player is gunning for – and it believes that of all the competitors out there, it is in the best position to deliver on that promise.
It believes it has all the assets – flights, hotels/vacation rentals, cruise, tours and activities; insurance; tech platform; talent; and data – to reduce friction at every point of the travel experience.
In his opening, Mark Okerstrom, president and CEO, spoke of “unlocking the full power of our global platform to drive change of another kind”.
Clearly determined to set sights on the future – there was no mention of its recent lacklustre financial results during the morning’s presentations – Okerstrom set the tone for a future that looks more diverse and inclusive (reflected in its new leadership team), that is less about individual brands and more about “group first”; that is about breaking down the internal silos to deliver on the promise of the connected trip; and that is about empowering its partners with the right tech solutions to create value for customers.
Cyril Ranque, newly-appointed president of Travel Partners Group, later said to the media, “We are organising our tech teams to get there and we are putting the entire company behind our tech platform to deliver on that vision.”
On stage, Okerstrom reeled off the numbers that would help it get there – 2b interactions and data exchanges everyday and 3b+ search combinations, 20m partner conversations the last 12 months, 1.7m virtual agent discussions in which 50% did not require human interaction; John Kim, group president, platform and marketplaces, spoke of using AI to make sense of all the data to reduce friction for customers and partners; and Ariane Gorin, president, Expedia Partner Solutions, called on everyone to ‘focus on what only you can do”.
Gorin cited partnerships such as Expedia working with United Airlines to enable its frequent flyers to use Expedia’s VIP Access to enjoy benefits in hotels as well as the partnership between Marriott and Expedia on distribution of wholesale rates, which generated as much discussion off-stage as it did onstage.
While some might think it ironic that the message of the “frictionless travel experience” came right after a talk by O’Brady on the all the friction he faced in his adventures, and how much he learnt about himself through those ordeals, Abhijit Pal, Head of LPS Research, put it in context when he said, “We don’t want it to be totally friction-free, there’s some friction in travel that we enjoy, for example, rock climbing. Our goal is not to remove all friction, but friction in the booking, shopping and research process can be removed.
“What we want to do is remove online friction so that you can enjoy the offline experience.”
An Online Travel Friction Index, released today, identified key factors that reduce traveler friction through a ‘friction reduction index.’; a weighted average numerical score rating over 15 experience attributes that nearly 850 online travel users, ages 18-55, used to rate their experiences related to research, shopping and booking of travel products on various travel websites.
Results from this research identified the top five most impactful friction reduction attributes as:
- An easily navigable booking website
- Inventory that is the best value
- Ability to filter and sort a specific room type
- Option to redeem special offers
- Ability to quickly filter and sort specific hotel location criteria
According to the research, Expedia Group brands consistently ranked higher in all five areas than other OTAs or branded chain sites that were included in the research. Expedia Group is also rated at least as well as, if not significantly higher, than hotel direct booking sites on every attribute in the ‘friction reduction’ index.
As to specifically what it is doing to remove pain points, the group highlighted different tools such as the new Partner Central Chatbot, powered by the next generation of the company’s AI Lab’s Centralized Conversational Artificial Intelligence Platform (CCAIP) architecture and a new recommendation engine driven by dozens of machine Learning algorithms intertwined together. “Currently, this engine is generating 2.5 million recommendations and will continue to evolve to be more precise,” it said.
Brand Expedia also announced the launch of a trip assistance function on the app, that will alert the hotel a traveler will be checking in, if the traveler is experiencing a flight delay of 8+ hours, regardless of where the flight was booked. Brand Expedia is also piloting a shuttle tracking technology programme built by Track My Shuttle into the Expedia App, allowing hotel guests to see exactly where to find shuttle pickup for their hotel, and follow along with a live route map.
Egencia, Expedia Group’s corporate travel brand, recently launched Smart Mix, a feature that intelligently analyzes data and complex scenarios, factoring in the personal preferences of each traveler and their company’s travel policy to deliver smarter search results out of hundreds of hotel and flight options.
On stage, Ranque said, “Our goal is to turn a bad experience into a good one and turn a good one into a lifelong memory. That is our Everest.”