IT is ironic that even as the travel industry has shed millions upon millions of jobs, one sector that has expanded and remains voracious for talent is on the tech side.
Almost all travel businesses have used the down-time of Covid to invest in their tech stack, whether consumer-facing or back-end operations. And while jobs in marketing, communications, operations and customer service have been eliminated, tech teams have been bolstered across the world.
Speaking at the WiT Travel Roadshow, Episode 3, last week, Mieke de Schepper, executive vice president online travel and managing director Asia Pacific for Amadeus, said, “What we see is, a lot of OTAs are working on everything around rebuilding trust and confidence of travellers, and really focusing on how to create this frictionless travel journey.”
Indeed, an Amadeus survey conducted among consumers in November 2020 had identified the the three top technologies that would make them comfortable to travel again.
• Mobile applications that provide on-trip notifications and alerts (45%)
• Contactless mobile payments (e.g., Apple or Google Pay, Paypal, Venmo) (44%)
• Mobile boarding (e.g., having your boarding pass on your mobile phone) (43%)
But beyond the consumer-facing tech, de Schepper said OTAs were also investing in automation. “All the refunds happened in March 2020 was a complete mess and clearly the automation wasn’t in place. So they are investing in automation, and making that better. And they’re doing a lot of back end work, things that you don’t see as a consumer, like cloud migrations, rebuilding some of the stacks, all the things that are super hard to do when you’re running at 100 miles per hour.”
And not only are OTAs investing in tech, “they are also going where the talent is. They are tapping into talent all over the world because location really doesn’t matter anymore”, she said.
The challenge is, travel is facing stiff competition for talent. Other sectors are booming – gaming, logistics, fintech – and it’s hard to compete when your industry is in macro shock and you cannot afford to pay competitive salaries, nor is travel much fun right now.
“Travel is too hard right now”
It was a headache acknowledged by tech and product chiefs on a later panel. “A lot of people join travel to travel and you can’t do that right now,” said Richard Nasser Kua, vice president, product, Wego. “Travel is too hard right now,” said David Li, chief product officer, Klook. Chan Chee Chong, CEO and co-founder, GlobalTix said, “Once we can travel again, they will feel the excitement of travel and they will be back.”
Khang Nguyen Trieu, group chief technology architect, Accor, said, “Actually travel is still an attractive industry. If you gave the choice for someone to work in a bank or in a travel company, I think in terms of industry, travel is still much very attractive.”
The challenge is the uncertainty – “am I going to be fired in a six months, one year because the company’s not doing well, and I think that’s a legitimate concern”, he said, adding that companies must address this by giving talent the confidence that “things are going to progress whatever the situation is, that their employability will not suffer but on the contrary, they will continue to do amazing things”.
Kua said, “It is important for us to be great mentors for the next generation of your teams because no matter how much you get paid, I’m sure all of us have been there before – where you don’t have mentors and you just stagnate in your career.”
Agoda’s John Brown: “Cool people doing cool things attract other cool people”
When asked how he kept the buzz up about travel tech and how he kept his tech team motivated, John Brown, CEO of Agoda, said, “One, people who are working in technology, we find again and again, they themselves want to be challenged. They themselves want to work with people who are doing really, really cool stuff. They want to feel like they’re learning.
“So first and foremost, we have some of the best technologists in the industry, so when new people are coming along, and they talk to those people, they say, this really is pretty cool, I want to learn from that person. So our top technical gurus, they attract people around them.
“Now what do you do to keep those gurus going? You have to keep letting them run with new ideas. If all we were going to do forever was the same old accommodation stuff, they would get bored. But as soon as we say, hey, we’re going to build a fintech product or the ASQ (Alternative State Quarantine) product, people get excited all over again.
“We try to be nimble, we move people around. One of our key foundational notions is to allow people to take ownership. So a relatively junior tech person at Agoda can raise his or her hand and say, I want to build ASQ and, as a matter of fact, that’s exactly how ASQ was built. They got a team of people together, and they built it. They took ownership.
“You have to give them latitude to do what they want to do to grow and surround them with the best people and you’re off to the races.”
But how do you even get started with putting an “A” team in place? One way is through an acqui-hire as Agoda did when its parent company, in 2014, bought Israel’s adtech startup, Qlicka. The Israeli team was deployed to work on Agoda and much of that team remains intact and in product leadership positions at the Bangkok-based OTA.
Said Brown, “Yes, if you can find a small company like that with great technologists like we did, by all means – it was a great acquisition.”
How to identify, attract and retain “A” players
In his talk, “How To Attract and Retain ‘A’ Players ”, Fritz Demopoulous, CEO, Queen’s Road Capital, said high-performing individuals were worth more than weight in gold. “Typically, a high-performing individual is 4x more productive than an average employee. And more striking, for complex work – such as what we do in tech – high-performing staff are 8x more productive.
“The same concept applies to teams, not just individual performers. Amazing teams, made up of all sorts of levels of people, are more productive by many factors than average teams. And between companies within the same industry or category, the leading firms perform amazingly better than average firms.
“The best – the top 5%, the top 1% – will make a meaningful, Earth-shattering difference to any company. And it is not just efficiency, to echo Steve Jobs again, the doers are also the thinkers. They offer fundamental strategic insights. They have the passion, the wherewithal, the insane drive to learn and understand, and ultimately to achieve wonderful results.”
Demopoulous said hard, tough questions needed to be asked by employers who need to think strategically about “changes in values, thinking, preferences and compensation” to attract “A” players.
One question is, “can you hire well? Do you know an ‘A’ player when you meet one? It goes without saying that the traditional filtering or labeling methods don’t work anymore. A Harvard degree and experience at Goldman – two common filters – are not a predictor of startup success.
“Neither are the more recent filters or labels – a Stanford degree and experience at Google. And it’s uncertain whether or not a Thiel Fellow, Y-combinator alumni and Forbes 30 under 30 winner will lead to any success that is statistically significant. All this means you’ll have to ignore the labels and instead spend substantially more time with potential candidates to really get a sense who they are.”
To watch the full event, watch the on-demand video here