The latest stop in a busy fall event schedule was APEX EXPO in Long Beach where we unveiled our new Airline Commerce Platform. The event is billed as the largest passenger experience focused expo and was alongside with both the International Flight Services (think wine and food hand outs) and Aircraft Interiors (imagine massaging seat demos) Expos.
Key Takeaways from APEX EXPO
Many of the same themes from the Aviation Festival made their way into the technology and passenger experience conference tracks. Some things that stood out:
- Big Data and Personalization: Once again, these themes were front and center with lots of talk about the need to break data silos, applying AI, and delivering on the promise of personalization to passengers.
- Less Is More: To remain competitive, airlines continued to talk about stripping back their offerings and allowing passengers to pay to personalize and tailor their experience – a trend that obviously bodes well for Guestlogix.
- IFE Disruption: Reading the tea leaves… IFE seems like it’s on the brink of being disrupted. A lot of vendors, a lot of overlap in solutions, Netflix poking around, and just generally noisy. It will be interesting to see if that disruption comes from an incumbent like Panasonic or Thales (who won the “Cool Tech” award that had a lot of personalization messaging/capabilities in it) or a new entrant.
- Booth Beasts: This space goes big on booths. It was hard not to have booth envy when you’re situated next to Panasonic’s ~1000 sq foot behemoth. The investments in the booths puts even the most elaborate booth in the tech space to shame.
- Community: The airline and vendor community is very much a tight knit group. Not only does everyone seem to know everyone, but it was nice to see and be involved in all the partnering and networking conversations.
Guestlogix Roadmap
Conducting live demos of the new platform gave another level of important data points and feedback for our roadmap. Highlights included:
- Extending our focus from our historical onboard approach to the full day-of journey for passengers was well received. People had lots of ideas to share on the additional revenue generation opportunities we can drive as well as areas where we can impact a passenger’s experience.
- Connectivity remains a big concern for the industry. There were lots of questions about how we’ve been able to address inventory awareness and other capabilities regardless of connectivity state. Being a pioneer in the offline payments space is a big advantage allowing us to work regardless of connectivity.
- Demonstrating several prescriptive algorithms on real data went a long way to highlight its potential to make a significant impact on revenue.
- Our new campaign capabilities highlighted the opportunity for a new level of creative, personalized marketing to make its way into day-of-journey retail. Social channel targeting – check… In-flight contests – check… Purchase a drink and send to a friend in the air – check.
- Too many Pringles in a day can do serious damage to the roof of one’s mouth
With almost 1000 live demos of the new platform under our belts over the three days at APEX EXPO (great job, Guestlogix booth team!), we are ready to take it to another level at the World Passenger Symposium, October 24-26 in Barcelona. Make sure you swing by booth 29 and get some hands on time with our new airline commerce platform.
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