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So just just a big welcome firstly I guess. Thank you for joining us. We always find town halls work well when people turn up. So tick the first box that we’ve actually got people to come and join us so thank you for that! To set expectations, we’re going to talk only for a few minutes. Just a sort of quick business update from each of the three of us and then we can really open up to the floor. So start thinking now what’s on your mind right? If you don’t know us, you can ask whatever you like. And I promise we will do our absolute best to give you a transparent, honest, frank, straightforward answer to any questions you've got. That doesn’t include you Neil! But seriously anything you want to know that’s on your mind. We've got some bouncy box mikes that we throw around. Which is always good fun. And as Nick said earlier if you don't ask questions we will. So either way we'll keep the discussion going as we move through and then we'll be around afterwards with teas and coffees and some cakes as well. So thank you. I’ll kick us off. So just thought I’d spend two or three minutes talking about the Agency world. What's been going on the past few months. What’s working well, where some challenges are etc. just just really to set the scene. I'm going to move over to see if it's me. Are we clashing a little bit. I'm still on the telly right. So we’ve had a busy few months so let’s start internally first really looking at what we’ve been doing over the past few months as an Agency business. So back at the start of the year we we spent a big chunk of time looking at how we go to market. How are we structured to go and address agencies out in the world, given that our world is changing - the way agents behave the way they want to interact with us as a supplier. And so we looked at that. And what we’ve done is we’ve restructured the Agency business globally to do a few things. One is we've segmented out our business. So a great example that we all Global OTA business unit. If you look at the big OTA, they want to have a different relationship with us. So what we’ve done is we’ve taken our 82 largest OTA customers and we manage them in a single business unit. And what we’ve also done is make sure there’s no overlaps between one business unit and the other. So it's really clear and we can be really super clear on who's accountable and responsible for which each part focuses. So that's one thing we've done. Second thing we’ve done as part of that is we’ve segmented out in each of our regional businesses our customers. The way in which we manage and look after a really large customer, a medium sized customer and a small customer needs to be different. We need to apply the right level of resource, the right capacity, the right level attention to those customer sets . Historically we’ve had more of a country-based model. And that was right. That was the right thing to do with how the market worked, how technology worked, how the relationships with our customers were. But as you look forward not just where we are today but how this stuff is all going to work in the future years, segmenting out is a slightly smarter and more future proof way of operating. So those are just some of the things. We’ve done a big piece of work to really restructure the agency business to something that future-proofs us for where we want to be and where we want to go to. That’s really sort of the internal activity that’s been going on over multiple months. We’re pretty much there - Europe particularly which a lot of you guys part of it is pretty much done. And we’ve got a new leader, Alistair Rodger, who many of you have met who’s come in and is leading our European business. Americas - we’ve done a chunk of work there and are still looking at some pieces with Simon and the team. And then Marc and the Asia team have also done a piece of work. The last piece on structure to talk about is our Operators. So what we’ve also done is put in place a global Operators business unit. So 96 countries globally are managed by Operators - nearly 25% of our revenue comes through third parties - our third party operator relationships. So it makes a lot of sense for us to manage these guys in a single structure business unit. And that way we can do a much better job of supporting them at selling for us. If you think about it, across those Operators we’ve got nearly 2000 salespeople who all go to work every day effectively with a version of a Travelport badge on, out, selling to customers. So we need to do a much better job of supporting them from a marketing perspective from a sales collateral perspective, from a pricing, customer engagement, technology. And the idea of putting a global Operator business unit together is to really help us professionalize our channel, for that really critical component of our business. So that’s all the internal stuff. In terms of the market, pretty good year so far. When you think about new business, this will be our largest new business year ever. We are looking and forecasting to sell about 24 million new business incremental segments this year in 2019. To put that into context, that’s a 44% increase over what we did from a new business business perspective last year. So really really good performance. A big part is fueled by business in India. So our contract with Air India has enabled that. So working together with Jason we’re really driving hard to maximize our position in the Indian market. But it’s not just that - put India to one side we’re still doing really well and selling more new business globally in all our other markets. Where that gets us to is as you know we’ve had a number of substantial challenges in the business round some big customer losses. What this new business does is it now gets us back to a path where we we sort of lap those losses and we start to get the business into growth. So over the past three months since July, August, September we’ve started to see our market share growing. So we start to get the trajectory of market share moving in the right direction. Now there's a lot of work to do right. We need a really big year next year from a new business perspective. We need our existing customers to start growing our share of wallet with those guys and we need to make sure that we maintain all our critical customers that we have. There’s an awful lot to do in that space. But the trajectory’s set in the right direction. Last piece for me is just really thinking about how we get out to customers and what our message is all about. So the last thing we’re trying to do is really tidy up how we are going to talk to our customers. And I’m really now teeing up Fiona and Jason and some of the items they’re going to talk about. We need to be much much clearer with our customers on what strategy is. On our direction as Travelport. Where we want to be as a private organization as opposed to a publicly listed and traded company. What it is we're doing in our technology stack. How that’s going to add value - and either help an agency grow its top line, as in go and attract more customers and get more revenues from them or reduce its cost base and be more efficient. Because frankly we’re not helping an agency do one of those two things, we’re not actually helping them. So we're clearing up some of our messaging and over the next couple of months what you'll see coming out is a much cleaner strategy from us that we can all clearly articulate - maybe something we can start doing tests on in the town halls - “Who can articulate the strategy?” More doughnuts! so that we can all be super clear as a business. I think we've been a bit confused over the past couple of years or so on being really clear on what the 4 or 5 things are that we stand for, how we’re going to go to market and how we add value for our agency customers. And in the same way to tee up Jason - Jason and the Travel Partners team need to have the same strategy but with the other side of the coin - here’s how we add value for those distribution customers as well. So just a bit of a highlight of some of the things that are happening in the Agency distribution world. Lots of change, lots of internal activity but importantly we’re starting to really - I’m really enthused and excited about starting to see our market share moving in the right direction, seeing our new business, being able to execute the largest new business year in the company’s history and really teeing ourselves up for the future So really good 2019 - very bumpy so much going on but setting ourselves up I think for a pretty exciting year next year. Thank you. So let’s talk you know for those of you who heard me speak or spent any time with me you know been around this business for a while this is a two-sided business model as we know and so Nick's talked about the agency customer side of the equation which you know we also talk about as being the demand side that sort of drives the volume that we’ve reflected. The other side of the equation is the other side is the supply side or the partner customers and I think is really important as we continue to move forward that everybody recognizes we have two sets of customers - demand and supply - and actually it’s the combination of the two of them that fundamentally drives revenue profit and you know sort of the growth of this business. And so let me talk a little bit about the partner side of the equation and how we think about it, to support that demand side because you know 1x1 means something 0x1 or 1x0 doesn’t. And so I am a broken record on that and I won't apologize. So we think about as we look at content. So I think my team’s job on the content side is broadly split into three areas. One of them is around content acquisition. So how do we bring new content into the platform that allows Nick's team to be successful to sell? And I think we’ve had really strong traction on that from over the last 12 months. We’ve seen you know Nick touched on Air India where we brought in some exclusive content and there are a number of other players particularly in sort of that Indian subcontinent and out into Asia which is I think where we've been looking to close some of our content gaps or where we've had more content gaps historically. Collectively they’ve been pretty successful. That’s helped fuel you know the the 24 million segments that Nick references which is good for us all right. And so Damian ’s team on the air side and then with the hotel and the car team that's fundamentally their job is to go out and look for those content gaps that are out there that allow us to drive volume demand for Nick’s team. The second area to think about is renewal. There's no point just bringing in new content. The content that we've got in the system today must be renewed. We have c450 agreements across sort of air car and hotel providers. They're generally a two to five year deal that we're looking at. And so you know the teams are constantly in a renewal basis and there’s a few things there. Firstly we need to renew the full content. So how do we make sure you know in our discussions with our partners that we're showing enough value that they’ll give us everything that they’ve got to put into the platform. Secondly you know as part of that we've got to do that at a price point that is you know strong enough to maintain this two sided model right? We all understand that we we charge one side and we revenue share with the other. That's the industry we sit in. It's not unusual. We’ve got to make sure that we maintain the price point so you know that content renewal side is where you probably see a lot more of the friction. It's where we see a lot more the noise in the market where you know airlines will take action against us as an industry at times to try and you know stir that up and our job fundamentally is to prove the value that we bring to that set of customers is equal to the price point that they're pay to distribute by the platforms. And again you know we’ve had some material successes this year - at times quite frankly that have given us some headwinds where we've had to move on some of our price points - others we’ve not. And we continue to sort of drive up the value of the price point that we've seen from those partners. I think the third part as we think about it is content changes and if you think about all of those three buckets. What’s content changes? This is the whole IATA NDC that I know we've talked about a few times at different town halls. And that is probably the loudest rhetoric that's out there from airlines at the moment about trying to change the model - it’s what’s fueling some of the new startups that are coming into the market. But in reality you know we've been working on this for probably two to three years as an industry. IATA NDC is not new - the standards were launched 2011 and so here we are eight years later and we’ve seen very little adoption right? Now, if you think about it these are you know on that side still are our air customers right. So we still need to have frank open and structured conversations as all of the air partners to understand what they’re trying to achieve. And fundamentally as you talk to them they’re looking at trying to make it much more of a retailing personalized controlled offer that they put out to a traveler. That’s fundamentally what they’re trying to achieve. And so you know Ian Heywood and team and I know a lot again on Nick’s side are having you know if not daily certainly weekly conversations with airlines and agencies about “what does this mean to the model going forward?” you know how do we facilitate an improvement in that whole distribution model and so NDC is going to continue to be with us. The adoption rate at the moment is tiny. You know we started to launch people like Qantas has been announced recently. You know we're in discussions with all of the top 20 carriers around the world on this front but you're going to hear and see that conversation ongoing because quite frankly in the industry everyone's learning including us. There's a lot of learnings to do on the technology there's a lot of learnings to do on the economics. There's a little learnings to do on how they actually use the technology to improve the customer or the traveler experience. And so again happy to talk a little bit about it as well to prompt hopefully some questions around that as we get into discussion but that is something we will continue to work through. We're committed to it as part of the industry. But I think we’re going to see sort of a path meander quite frankly over the next year or two as that really settles into being a core part of our business. The fourth part then of Travel Partners as an organization is around how do we then add more revenue or adjacent revenue into the mix. And so that’s things like the digital business that we do for BCD and for easyJet as probably our two largest customers. The good news on those that the team in Dublin have renewed both of those as contracts for the long term. You’ll have seen or have seen easyJet won the best mobile app again. And so you know the Dublin team you know collectively development commercial product across the board should be really proud of the achievements they’ve made in that space to continue to innovate and drive performance for them. They've also just committed with easyJet that they're now going to try and make their holidays mobile app more like the flight only. And again that’s good for us because we’re the development partner for that . Obviously we charge them for our skills and our innovation as well as the physical development. And similarly with BCD they’ve committed for a multi-year agreement on their development of what they call “trip source” which is their mobile app that they actually use on all GDSs you know across all of their customer base around the world. And then we continue to push on you know things like digital media how do we grow our advertising business that's quite challenged at the moment. The team are working really hard to close some of the gaps that they've got. It’s a tough business you know and it’s a tough market but it’s hugely profitable for us. So we work again hard I think with both the product then with Nick’s Agency team how do we make sure that we’re advertising across all of the platforms that we’ve got because you know the revenue that that fundamentally drives. And then I think you know the other one I would say is as well as we talk a lot about NDC and merchandising you know we have a product out there today that is best in class with Rich Content and Branding for our air partners and it’s all about how do we show their products their services in our desktop or in our API. We tend to have taken that as just something that’s just run of the mill now and it's not it's still a huge focus for you. We have 274 airlines participate. We’ve 82 out of our top 100 airlines to participate. And it drives tens of millions of dollars of direct revenue to our bottom line and many many more millions of value out to our airline partners. And so as we think about additional revenue we will keep positioning and driving that reach of that product because it's just critical to the value proposition that we put out to the customers. So they’re really the four areas. So think about it as acquisition, renewal, the changes to content and then sort of additional revenue. And that's really what we focus on for this year. And as Nick talked about with the strategy that will form part of our strategy as we move into to 2020 2021 and beyond. Fiona.... Thanks Jason, Nick. So I’ll give a sense of what’s been happening across the customer marketing organization over the last period. I think you've a sense from both Nick and Jason of pretty significant change within our business in response to a market that's actually hugely dynamic and changing also. When we think about our business and that to sort of model that Jason talked about our business is a travel commerce platform at delivering value to both sides of the market and within the Customer Marketing Organization our remit, our goal is very much to ensure that we're driving awareness and demand of the value of our platform to ensure that we're building the right products that we deliver through our platform to the market and to ensure that we're supporting our customers and giving the kind of world class care that they expect from a major travel brand. Across this year there’s been a lot happening within our function and I’ll give a sense of some of the priorities that we’ve had and how we’re delivering against those. Firstly from a product perspective a hugely intense year a year when we're really bringing some of our next gen products to market through different phases Alpha Beta and through to general availability of those products in the early part of next year. Of course that’s against a backdrop of really big transformation across Product and Technology over the last 18 months since we brought those organizations together. As part of the bringing of the organizations together we’ve really sought to up the quality of product management across our portfolio and ensure that together with Technology we’re delivering at the right pace and with the right quality for our customers. Certainly wouldn’t say we’re fully there yet but I think 18 months of really solid progress. You’ve heard us talk a lot about Scaled Agile over the last period and we now have all of the applicable work in our shop that can be delivered through Scaled Agile being delivered. So really important milestone, now it’s about refining our ways of delivery, ensuring that Commercial Product and Technology work in absolute synchronicity and that we ensure that we’ve got the right structure around our delivery for the future. As part of the product portfolio I’ve mentioned kind of some of the focus area, tripservices, we’re live with Priceline. We’re live with Webjet and continuing to mature the delivery of further services through our next gen API . On the NDC side major demand for the market for us to respond strongly with the right volume of airline connectivity and the right consumption of that NDC content through smartpoint. On that front, working towards having 10 airlines live this year. So a major milestone for us and certainly some complexity that we've had to overcome as we've got there. This is an evolving standard. Everyone in the mix is figuring it out. In many respects and as we figure it house we're ensuring that we keep a pace of delivery that will keep us in a strongly leading position in the market. And from a marketing perspective a lot happening across the Marketing team I see many Marketing faces in the room here. It’s been over the last weeks event season for us - Travelport Live is our flagship internal travel point event. We're running it in three locations this year Venice which we ran back in September. Dubai for Middle East and Africa customers and our APAC event will take place in a couple of weeks time in Shanghai. And a really important event series to allow us to tell our story strongly to the markets to give the market confidence that we are delivering the right solutions to our customers and really a good networking forum and an event that allows us to get close to top customers engage them and move the dialogue forward with those customers. We touch about 700 customers across that event series. But one thing which we've focused really strongly on doing at a bigger scale than ever before this year is ensuring that we deliver digital and a a digital event experience. In addition to an in-person experience. Strong focus from the Digital and Social team on that and strong success I think when we look at the numbers. We’ve had about 5 million engagements with our event content online over a million views of some of the video content coming from that event. So really good extension of our events out through digital formats. So good to see that kind of extension and increased awareness and reach happening. Customer campaigns continue to run in fact today we have webinars taking place for OTA customers in Europe and in the Americas. We’ll have about 200 OTA customers join us on that webinar. Just as one example of the kinds of things that we're doing to ensure that our message is reaching and that we're telling the right story and engaging the right way with our customers. From an ops perspective, it’s been a really really intense period for the Operations team over the last while. The last 18 months or so have been about building the right foundations to get us to a world class digital-first experience for our customers. And we’ve reached some major milestones in the past couple of weeks really. Many of you will be aware that we've transitioned from our legacy Customer Support provider Stefanini to our new provider Wipro. We’ve now rolled off the final customer support volumes from Stefanini at the end of September. It went smoothly but a pretty mammoth effort as we hired two hundred new agents in Wipro trained those agents and support them to deliver the right experience for our customers going forward. And that piece together with global telephony system implementation and voice over IP solution as well as a new agent desktop allows us to really deliver efficiently as well as deliver in the right future digital way for the customer. Really important that that infrastructure is in place to allow us to now make further steps forward and support our customers in the way that they want to engage with us. So across those functions - Marketing Product and Operations a lot happening and a team that’s been really stretched over the last period but a team that’s been enormously committed to doing the right thing for our customer and moving our business forward. I think a backdrop as Nick also referenced of intensity for us as we really seek to give more strategic clarity to our organization - that’s work that’s happening in the background. And when we do events like this when we do employee surveys we hear all the time that this is one of the top topics coming through from our people a real hunger to understand where we're positioned in our industry in the future and what our strategy is to deliver successfully and deliver the growth that we all want to be a part of. So major focus for us in terms of delivering that strategic clarity for our people and for our customers. But we can take more questions on that. I think also I’m sure there’ll be some. Good. So let's kick off with questions. We said we’d do three minutes each so we managed make that half an hour -that’s good..
johny October 15, 2024 04:38 PM Delete
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