AIRLINE INFORMATION - Key Persons
Airlines are beginning to understand that gamification provides a set of tools that compliment their existing loyalty practices, says Aaron Carr, CEO and founder, Friendefi.
There really are many options for using gamification to create fun, interactive ways of obtaining educating customers, capturing customer data, driving transactions, and more.
Airlines are trying to incorporate gamification into routine features of a loyalty program. Be it for social activity, for instance, rewarding for completing valuable social sharing activities, or flying on specific routes, such initiatives need to fulfil a certain objective.
And rather than just focusing on the tactical aspect, airlines need to augment the overall experience via gamification, Carr told Ai Correspondent Ritesh Gupta.
"The effort is in combining all valuable data sources into one customer hub and ensuring that the commerce system can turn an insight into an offer," says Aidan Brogan, CEO, Datalex.
Job Titles:
- Senior Events & Marketing Manager
- Senior Events Manager
Angella is a Senior Events & Marketing manager with over 10 years of experience in developing and implementing international events and conferences through innovative thinking. Prior to joining Ai Events, she worked as an Event Manager at Accelya in Barcelona, Spain for 7 years, where she gained a deep knowledge of the airline and payment industries.
She began her career working in Advertising and Media in her hometown of Lima, Peru. After 10 years of working in Barcelona she went back to Peru in 2015. In June 2019 she returned to Spain and now she is based in Madrid. She holds a degree from the University of Lima in Communications. Angella is native Spanish speaker and is fluent in English and French.
Over the years Chris has gained a masterful reputation for developing and organizing conferences, training and events. He currently heads business development at Ai Events.
Chris began his career in the airline industry as a Tariff Analyst at ATPCO in Washington D.C. and later worked as an Aviation Analyst at the U.S. Department of Transportation and as Manager of Revenue Management at Amtrak.
Prior to co-founding Airline Information, Chris worked as a Business Development Manager at IATA in both Miami and Geneva, Switzerland. At IATA, he working in marketing, including organizing dozens of airline conferences around the globe. Chris holds degrees in Business Administration, History and Latin American Studies from the University of Pittsburgh. He speaks fluent Spanish and is a certified Meeting Planner.
Job Titles:
- Chairman of the Collinson Group
We recently caught up with Colin Evans, the Chairman of the Collinson Group. He shared his insights in to innovation and what the Collinson Group is currently developing.
One of these key initiatives is Airport Testing for COVID. Currently, one testing site at Heathrow Airport is working for British Airways, American Airlines and Cathay Pacific to do on airport testing prior to departure.
You can watch the full interview online and hear more about contactless and other developments. You can also access the video via this hyperlink: click here
Job Titles:
- Experienced Airline Executive
Experienced airline executive Dean Dacko asserts the challenge is three-fold: the lack of a full 360 view of the customer behaviour including customer touch points outside of marketing + competitive search and transaction activity; the inability to convert customer data into actionable customer insights to deliver relevant customer value in real-time; the fear of making the major investments required (technology, systems, processes, talent) without a guarantee of return on investment success.
Job Titles:
- President - Payabillity
- President, Payability
Our chat with Duane Tough, President, Payability & keynote speaker at the Co-Brand Partnerships Conference held in Chicago on 26 & 27 May 2015.
Job Titles:
- Head of Marketing, Loyalty Programs
"It is an outrage that in 2015 it still costs 3% to process a payment, points out Klee, who is all set to complete three decades in the travel industry.
Job Titles:
- Director
- Executive Interview
Our chat with Jerome Seidita, mobile commerce director, Nok Airlines, outlines some of the issues facing airlines for mobile commerce, topics which were discussed and debated at the Airline & Travel Payments Summit (ATPS) Asia-Pacific (Bangkok, 26 - 27 Aug 2015) and will be covered at the 9th Airline & Travel Payments Summit (ATPS) Worldwide (Ft. Worth, 29-30 Oct 2-15)
Job Titles:
- CEO, Farelogix
- Executive Interview
With developments such as the new standard NDC, airlines are able to deliver richer, more personalized offers across multiple channels. But still there is a need to curb the gap between direct and indirect channels when one considers the overall point of sale capabilities, asserts Jim Davidson, CEO, Farelogix
Today's fraud management systems use only supervised machine learning, which is a reactive approach to treat fraud, says Justin Lie, CashShield's CEO.
"It is true that traditional machine learning has improved fraud management to a certain extent - automating some processes, collecting more data to churn and analyse, but it still falls short from real time machine learning. Without real time learning, supervised machine learning is unable to predict and counter unknown fraud attacks, since it is reliant only on the data on historical fraud attacks. Additionally, these systems can only produce probability scores for each transaction, therefore still requiring a great amount of manual reviews. With the three metrics in mind, traditional machine learning systems are scoring only a 3 out of 10, its full potential," explained Lie.
Lie asserts that unsupervised machine learning, or real-time machine learning, is far more effective as compared to its supervised machine learning counterpart. Its proactive approach to fraud allows the system to identify fraud before it happens and also automate the entire fraud management process to completely eliminate the need for manual reviews while keeping fraud rates low. Conversion rates also improve with the higher accuracy at proactively identifying genuine customers and fraudsters alike without any additional friction or blocks, he added.
"If merchants are simply rooted in relying on supervised machine learning, it is hard for them to move towards real time machine learning," said Lie. "Many merchants are also still reliant on manual reviews, which means that even if they were able to improve their machine learning algorithms and systems, they would always still be held back by the end process of manual reviews and human errors."
As for offering a relevant product via direct distribution, airlines are moving on from using a fairly simplistic algorithm, and are starting to adopt technology capable of taking input from customer management systems, usually in the form of a customer "score" that equates to a set of products to be offered. In order to know more about this and the current issues in distribution, Ai's Ritesh Gupta spoke to Rosenberg. Excerpts:
In his current role, Michael designs and develops the agendas for Ai's market leading events. From loyalty, ancillary merchandising to payments and fraud Ai, via its events, helps delegates connect not only with their peers but also market leading content and insights. He's also a co-founder of the Loyalty Fraud Prevention Association and has been actively moderating Loyalty Fraud Prevention sessions for the last few years.
Prior to Ai Events, Michael was a board Director of British Airways Global Financial Services Limited. This included responsibility for developing mileage sales with partners such as American Express, Avis Car Rental and bringing onboard all the brands within InterContinental Hotels and Resorts portfolio. Early on in this role, Michael recognized that real value could be delivered by BA (and other airlines) by understanding what customers were actually buying. It was more than just an airline seat, many of them wanted a "one stop" shop for the products ancillary to the flight. As a result, BA developed in-depth relationships with many of its Executive Club partners that delivered more benefits to passengers than just miles. It also delivered an additional multi-million pound revenue stream to BA on the back of these ancillary sales.
He is based in Glasgow, Scotland where he graduated with an MBA from the University of Strathclyde as well as having professional qualifications in Marketing UK's Chartered Institute
Executive Interview: Michael Strauss on controlling inventory, distribution and sales
Job Titles:
- Executive Interview
- General Manager - Loyalty Division
Our chat with Nik Laming, General Manager - Loyalty Division at Philippines' leading carrier Cebu Pacific Air, who spoke at the FFP Loyalty Conference, a part of 2nd Annual Mega Event Asia-Pacific (held in Singapore, 31st Aug 2015 - 2nd September 2015).
Job Titles:
- Commercial Director, Transavia
- Executive Interview
Personalization is so much more than just recuperating an abandoned shopping cart; it will require a lot of perseverance, leadership and investments, says Amsterdam, Netherlands-based Roy Scheerder, Commercial Director, Transavia
Roy Scheerder, Commercial Director, Transavia talks about what is being currenlty achieved and what is complex, and CAPEX intensive when it comes to personalization. Excerpts from interview with Airline Information's Ritesh Gupta:
Job Titles:
- Founder and CEO of Trusta
Saritta Hines, founder and CEO of TrustaBit, spoke to Ai's Ritesh Gupta about the solution, why the company chose a private blockchain rather than a public blockchain, the status of the offering and lot more. Excerpts:
Job Titles:
- ATPCO 's Managing Director - Product Strategy and Development
- Executive Interview
ATPCO's managing director - Product Strategy and Development, Thomas Gregorson acknowledges that when ATPCO initiated its journey 50 years ago, personalisation was not really a need.