Travel Tech Essentialist #103: Emotions and Muscle
2023 is the year of the rabbit, an animal that symbolizes abundance, good luck, and creativity. My best wishes so that you see lots of it this year in your personal and professional life. Looking forward to taking this year’s journey with you, and please reach out if I can be of help.
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mTrip is a leader in mobile travel, with a unique range of white-label platforms and custom solutions developed for the leisure and business travel industries. With flexible applications that are created to meet the specific needs of travelers, mTrip helps travel companies incorporate mobile tech innovation and maintain their competitive edge. With a strong focus on traveler experience, mTrip builds “all-in-one” exclusive solutions that will allow each client to take their customer service, engagement, loyalty and revenue opportunities to the next level.
1. Could 2023 be the year that sophisticated airline subscription programs become more mainstream?
My new post, Flight Subscriptions - a win for airlines and travelers, goes into the dynamics and outlook of flight subscriptions. Given the positive preliminary results of the existing airline subscription programs and the flexibility that airlines have in customizing them to fit their specific strategic needs, it is surprising that there are still so few airlines with subscription programs. In my research, I found only four airlines with real flight subscription programs. Since three of the four airline subscription programs were powered by Caravelo, I reached out to the founders and that conversation formed the base of my deep dive.
2. What’s next, and what are the implications that matter?
Scott Belsky is a deep thinker and also the founder of Behance, CPO of Adobe, and an early-stage investor. He wrote a great post -Forecasts for The Near Future, With Implications- on how the latest tech and culture trends will materially change work and life over the next 3-5 years, and what the implications are. A few that caught my attention (my comments in italics):
Hyper-personalized experiences disrupt traditional e-commerce and hospitality brands – and enable an immersive era that is tailored to you. As Sahil Bloom wrote in Curiosity Chronicle, if I can go to my favorite store, restaurant, or hotel and have an experience tailored to my preferences, I will go back there. This will be the key to retention and customer acquisition in the future.
AI will commoditize decades of content marketing and SEO tactics, and usher in a new era of brand and influencer marketing.
Subscriptions to knowledge communities are the new books. Thanks for subscribing to this knowledge community :-)
Current market conditions shift companies from the “carbs era” to the “muscle era” of building great organizations.
Twitter will serve as a case study of the impact of rapid resets and collapsing hierarchy in an organization. What happens when you remove multiple levels of managers and bring everyone doing the work closer together? Do you regain the agility of startups? Do you instantly shed years of "organizational debt" that restrains a product's potential? See the next item…
3. The Elon Musk effect
Speaking of transitioning from the carbs era to the muscle era and about taking a cue from Elon’s swift moves at Twitter, David Friedberg commented in a recent All-In podcast episode that Elon Musk's cost-cutting measures at Twitter could quickly become a new Silicon Valley standard as companies struggle to address the economic downturn.
In his words: “The most surprising thing was the incredible velocity of the head cutting, cost cutting, the demands that people return to work, return to the office. And we are seeing the impact on the rest of Silicon Valley, where now nearly every VC I speak with, every CEO, every board is looking to Elon's behavior for right or for wrong, for moral or not, and saying that's a model for how you can challenge your team to achieve the impossible in an impossibly difficult environment, which is what we find ourselves in. And so I think it was a series of surprising events. He bought Twitter, he made these incredible changes. And then everyone seems to be looking to that as a model. And it's really resonated. It's created a rippling effect. He shows the entirety of Silicon Valley that you can cut deep and you can turn a profit and you can do it fast.”
4. B2B Content Marketing
B2B Content Marketing Insights 2022 (published last year) provides some interesting information on B2B content marketing benchmarks, budgets and trends. Some of the takeaways from the 1,275 survey respondents around the globe.
Nearly 1/3 said their organizations were extremely or very successful with content marketing. Only 17% were minimally or not at all successful.
50% said their organization outsources at least one content marketing activity, with large companies being the most likely to outsource (75%).
The top challenge for B2B companies who outsource is finding partners with adequate topical expertise (65%). The second biggest challenge is finding partners who understand their audience (41%).
90% of respondents used short articles (less than 3000 words) for content marketing purposes in the last 12 months.
The top 3 content assets that produced the best results were virtual events, research reports and short posts.
5. Travel fintech trends to watch in 2023
David Doctor, EVP of payments at Amadeus and CEO of Outpayce (Amadeus’ new payments business), wrote a post on how the travel industry might benefit from advances in fintech and, conversely, where can the fintech sector find new growth opportunities in the travel industry. He highlights 4 topics: embedded finance; currency volatility; biometric authentication; Central Bank Digital Currencies and stablecoins. Read + Amadeus.
You might also want to take a look at the Travel Fintech Investment research report that was published by Amadeus in 2022, based on a survey completed by senior leaders at 70 large airlines and travel agencies (annual revenues > €500 million). The report covers the main challenges, new capabilities and opportunities in travel fintech as defined by the larger players in the travel industry.
6. Emotion by design
Emotion by Design is a book by Nike’s former CMO that shows how Nike built strong emotional bonds with consumers. Nike uses the entire range of emotions -happiness, sadness, fear, surprise, anger...- to forge powerful and deep connections with consumers that transcend sports. These 12 visuals by Stefan Morris Hernandez (a product designer and visualizer) shows some of the ways how Nike creates emotions by design. This could serve as inspiration for travel brands to use emotions by design to connect with consumers on a deeper, more human level. After all, few activities can elicit more emotions than travel.
7. Corporate travel’s purpose
Business travel must evolve to have "higher impact, lower footprint and greater inclusivity," according to the 15-page document posted on LinkedIn by Eric Bailey of Microsoft Travel. The document titled Corporate Travel’s Purpose - a Platform for Change is the result of a 6-month effort led by Microsoft and was coauthored by more than 20 travel managers and suppliers.
My interpretation of this document (cutting through all the buzzwords and lofty goals and promises) is: we need to get back on the road. In a tough business environment, virtual meetings won’t do the trick, and the strongest relationships, be they personal or professional, are built in real-time and face-to-face. Emotions create strong bonds (as the previous Nike story suggests) and they are most powerful and long-lasting in person as opposed to virtually.
From the report:
We must understand that the value from most business travel comes from the benefits of meeting in person. The key drivers for business travel include:
Building trust and social capital with new and existing contacts
Demonstrating commitment of time and dollars to partners, customers and employees.
Creating new ideas or opportunities that come from serendipitous conversations
8. The 4-letter code to sell anything: MAYA
Raymond Loewy, the father of industrial design, believed that consumers are torn between two opposing forces: neophilia, a curiosity about new things, and neophobia, a fear of anything too new. As a result, they gravitate to products that are bold, but instantly comprehensible. Loewy called his grand theory “Most Advanced Yet Acceptable”—MAYA. To sell something surprising, make it familiar, and to sell something familiar, make it surprising. Read + The Atlantic
This concept is similar to what I wrote in a November newsletter about the DoubleTree hotel cookie: to delight buyers, you must surprise them with unexpected value.
9. Spirit Airline pilot on a mission
Conversation between traffic control and a Spirit Airline pilot. Make sure to click on the image to see the video. Fake (pretty sure) but still funny.
10. Fundraising
Hotel Tech startup Mews closed $185 million Series C round, bringing the total amount raised to date to over $225 million.
Seattle-based Cabana, the mobile hospitality startup with a fleet of high quality, high-tech campervans, raised a $3 million round.
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Thanks for trusting me with your inbox,
Mauricio