A desire to collaborate and co-create between global OTA Trip.com and Lufthansa Group has showcased how partnerships can work for mutual benefit.
Heinrich Lang, Lufthansa vice president of digital retailing and order management, spoke alongside Trip.com on the second day of the Global Airline Conference in Amsterdam.
He said it was important that the partners built trust and understood what priorities each had in their businesses so they could cooperate where it made sense to do so.
Lufthansa was the first European carrier Trip.com has worked with on airfare shopping to optimise responsiveness to the airline’s content on its platforms.
Lang said the partnership has been committed to on both sides from concept to deployment and as a consequence it is seeing results.
He said the starting point has to be the traveller “that we're ultimately serving”. But he added: “At the same time, we also all recognise we're running large organisations.
“The important piece is to sit down honestly together and understand what do we actually each currently have in our plans?
“How are we looking at some of the challenges and opportunities…and then working through how we find that joint piece where we feel this is where we can co-create value.
“And then comes the key part is, once you have those nice slides of prioritised joint KPIs and targets, you actually need to commit to freeing up the resources and getting the teams together to get stuff done.”
Newly appoint chief executive of the Trip.com Flight Business Group, CT Ooi agreed that the key principal behind co-creation is thinking about what the traveller wants.
“The centre of this co-creation is the traveller - the value of removing the frictions and having seamless travel for the traveller is the most important objectives of this industry.
“In fact, everybody is doing their own part at this moment, and everybody is doing extremely well on their own part.
“But somehow the traveller is not feeling it. They still feel the frictions in travel. So, what are we doing wrong?
“In my opinion, there are few things that we can co create together that will definitely fundamentally change the game.
“For example, data. All organisations hold our own data as an asset. You are not wrong. You are correct. That's the right way.
“But there is a way for us to also share bilateral data that is allowed to be shared…that will help us to make more seamless fundamental shift for our customers.
“It could be data that inspires demand. One of the toughest questions is are we cannibalising each other? OTA versus the airline direct.
“We do not need to go down that path. The world is big enough, there's enough travel in the world, for us to co-share and co-create values.”
Ooi said there should also be a more collaborative approach when it to come to developing new technology.
“In the fast-moving pace of the current environment no one company can do best in terms of being a silo technology stack.
“Technology should go across from suppliers all the way to end users. And this the philosophy I liked about what Lufthansa did with their NDC project.
“They actually engaged the OTAs and agencies into their ecosystems and started asking what are the challenges, how do we fix them together at the beginning.
“These are some of the fundamentals…in order for us to co-create values for the customers, and not just co create values for our own internal silos or industry entities.”
