This week Amadeus announced that Lufthansa would be the first customer of its Altéa Corporate Recognition product.
Regular readers of Business Travel iQ will recognise the phenomenon of personalisation and corporate travel as something that expert Ian Heywood of Travelport laid out recently.
The Amadeus product is in the same stable as the Travelport merchandising platform. Travel technology companies are now providing travel suppliers with the technologies which have become commonplace in other sectors such as retail. They would not be doing this if they did not serve a useful function and meet a demand. What do personalisation tools offer for suppliers, travellers and buyers?
According to Amadeus, the Altéa product will recognise a traveller's corporate company and the specific traveller at the time of booking. This ensures targeted services and offers through every stage of the journey. In practice this could be everything from content choice at the time of booking to traveller identification for the transaction and booking (assigning a seat preference, say) to an offering of ancillary services which the technology judges to be suitable for the individual business traveller to an easier passage through the airport with services such as boarding passes, early check-in, faster transit through security and lounge access.
This may sound like the old "who owns the traveller" tussle which has gone on in the past among supplier, TMC and corporate but in reality no one "owns" a business traveller. However, that is not to say there isn't a supplier tussle and that is squarely between the traditional carriers and the low-costs.
Low-cost carriers have become accepted by travellers and buyers alike. They have taken domestic and short-haul business from the network carriers so network carriers must do something to add value (service in itself is not enough) to their business proposition to retain clients. Personalisation can add value for both travel managers and business travellers.
The benefits for travellers of increased recognition – from a faster ticketing and booking service to a quicker passage through the airport – are numerous. For the corporate the potential for more compliance and better data and more satisfied, happier travellers is a winning mix.
And for Lufthansa and other carriers personalisation maximises the opportunity to sell ancillary services at the time of booking to drive more revenue per passenger (the new metric which is superseding revenue per seat) and with the increased efficiency and tied-up service, retain business.