Some of these tools are so sophisticated, they predict problems and lay in alternatives before the traveler even knows they are delayed. “There has been a definite shift in the industry toward pro-actively helping travelers recover from disruptions or changes faster,” according to Travel Leaders Corporation president Gabe Rizzi.
The reason is simple. Disruptions cost travelers $60 billion worldwide, according to Lumo, a technology company which attacks flight delays and disruptions. The problems sometimes stem from air traffic management or weather. But the vast majority are caused by the airlines themselves, according to a Bloomberg study which shows carriers generate disruptions on six out of 10 flights. At 20.2 million minutes annually, the research found airline-caused delays are ten times those attributable to ATC and weather combined.
Lumo CEO Bala Chandan quantifies the cost. “There are two ways to think of ROI,” he explains. “Companies value a person’s time between $70-200 per hour, but for lawyers or consultants, it could be far more than that. If I can prevent a traveler sitting around the airport when they could be billing a client, I’ve done my job. There is also burnout. One of our clients is a consulting company that estimates the cost to rehire and train a replacement is $50,000, so preventing one person from leaving has a massive financial impact.”
Not Just About the Data
Not surprisingly the solutions are the result of harnessing big data to provide information to both travelers and travel managers, according to Flightglobal vice president travel services Robyn Grassanovits.
“For data to be useful, it has to be predictive and actionable,” she says. “That’s why I’m not big proponent of telling travelers their flight is disrupted because it just increases stress.” Instead, Grassoanvits advocates getting information in the hands of those who can actually do something about it.
“Success in mitigating disruptions is when the traveler does not feel the disruptions. The single biggest thing travel managers can do in recovering from disruption is not wait for disruption to strike,” she says. “Typically, waivers are done days in advance.”
Chandan, whose company has an app for travelers and one for TMCs, agrees. “At the level we forecast, we can
predict down to the flight the traveler has a 90 percent chance of having a two-hour delay or a 50 percent chance of a missed connection,” he explains. “It is all automated and works globally with updates for every flight in the world every 20 minutes. We can predict with a high degree of probability up to three months out.”
The system generates actionable information for both travel managers and travelers. “For the passenger, we alert them they are at a high risk for disruption and then provide them with recovery options at lower risk of disruption than the original flight. For the travel manager and meeting planners, with Lumo Navigator, they can proactively mitigate the impact of disruptions which increases traveler satisfaction. The value proposition for both traveler and TMC is productivity.”
Chandan points out that overall Lumo has saved Fortune 500 clients 10,000 hours of delay. “We can also predict the rises and falls in call volume so airlines and travel managers can staff properly,” he continues. “There is value across the entire travel ecosystem. In addition, we help corporations measure the impact of disruptions on productivity and wellness and to help travelers have a better travel experience.”
Increasing TMC Importance
So it is little wonder that proactive management is one of the key reasons travel management companies are rising in importance. “Travelers need to know travel managers have their backs. That is one of the biggest benefits of having a travel manager,” says Rizzi.
“It’s easy to book an airline ticket, but keeping a traveler on the itinerary is what we do. We follow them proactively, looking for problems before they happen and put mitigation tactics in place to rebook and reroute before they even know there’s an issue. We supplement this intervention with an SMS tool called Connect to address problems. They are connected real time to a specialist when there is a flight disruption.”
Carriers have been investing in technology to improve customer satisfaction as well. As Chandan notes, “Airlines are being more proactive with travelers, using their app to give real-time data on what is happening which is better than just being told their flight’s delayed. They are telling them why.”
For example, according to Business Insider, the United Airlines app has been reconfigured to provide not only delay information, but give the reason for the delay and what’s being done to rectify the situation. The redesign is intended to “alleviate traveler stress and anxiety” and to indicate the impact on arrival time.
It was also recently announced New York-area airports, partnering with TSA and BlipTrack, are providing live tracking tools to report both security and taxi queue times after a survey showed one in seven travelers had missed flights due to the long lines. BlipTrack has also been used at airports in Iceland, Netherlands and the UK.
Rizzi says these technology tools are about more than anticipating problems. “It is about the flexibility travelers need when a meeting runs short or long,” he explains. “This is about having the proper balance between technology and humans to ensure they recover faster and more efficiently.”
Harnessing Data
Commercial aviation churns out huge volumes of data every day. But gathering data is only the first step in the chain. The next step is that these big data sets must be monitored and analyzed before actionable information can be delivered to travel managers and their travelers.
Grassanovits explains Flightglobal’s strategy: “When disruptions happen we assess the impact on travelers and inform the traveler, personalized to their individual situation. Traveler misconnects gave way to another product which monitors a travelers’ itineraries in combination with real-time flight information to set up alerts to TMCs to get involved because the traveler is at risk. So we have both traveler alerts and agency alerts.”
Disruption management is hard because the most dynamic element of any trip is inventory, Grassanovits adds. “That availability can go in a heartbeat and you need to be on top of securing the last seat,” she says. “We partner with TMCs or airlines that have access to that inventory.”
The problem is both sets of data are reactive rather than proactive. In response, Grassanovits says, “We started monitoring a third data set – travel waivers issued by airlines. A lot of agencies just wait for the traveler to connect with them when they have a problem. We automated this new data, identifying all travelers (and their agencies) covered under waiver and send out alerts to help alleviate the effect of the disruption. It offers them a chance to fly out ahead of the storm, for instance.”
Given the high volume of calls during disruptions, everyone in the ecosystem – from airline call centers to TMCs to travel managers – gets bogged down. However, identifying this potential earlier has significantly sped up the process, Grassanovits says. “Since going live some customers have been able to reduce the amount of time travelers wait to get assistance by over one third. Agents and travelers no longer have to search for information; they can automatically apply it,” she says.
Counting the Cost of Disruption
These efficiencies will be more important in the future as passenger traffic is projected to double between now and 2035. “Couple that with the trend in ever higher load factors over the last decade and what you have left with is an extraordinarily brittle situation,” Grassanovits says.
The next step in Flightglobal’s anti-disruption platform is looking at historical data to predict problems to determine how disruptions have impacted individual travelers in the past. This is especially significant as corporations shift focus toward assuring the wellbeing of their road warriors to avoid health problems and burnout.
“Corporations need to know when travelers may be hitting a point when something is the last straw on the camel’s back. This new data set reports how much disruption travelers have experienced, which ones were the most impacted,” she explains. “When we did some of this analysis with our partner, PredictX, we analyzed a year’s worth of one corporation’s data and found they had almost 5.2 man years of delays. That’s an astonishing 46,000 hours.”
Such a significant loss is not going unnoticed, either by corporate travel programs or by carriers. “Airlines have begun putting performance guarantees in contracts. Delta makes huge noise about that. They are putting their money where their mouth is,” Grassanovits notes. “Now, we’ve got insight that watches that.”
While this technology to mitigate disruptions was initially rolled out as a C-Level perk, its value was easy to prove and has expanded rapidly to all travelers. “Corporate buyers spend a lot of time negotiating the best deals, but when something goes wrong everything goes out the window,” Grassanovits says. “This helps them understand the total cost of disruption and the traveler experience so it is top of mind.”
Another app for both travelers and TMCs is Freebird which enables disrupted travelers to rebook on available flights with just three taps on a mobile phone. Blending data science and customer service into a mobile product that works seamlessly with TMC partners, and then taking good care of any disrupted travelers, has resulted in very high Net Promotor Scores.
“While there are a lots of flight status services, Freebird is the only solution that actually uses all the data to proactively rebook travelers to get where they need to be,” CEO and founder Ethan Bernstein says. “It operates 24/7 with automated mobile rebooking and human support. Travelers have their own rebooking options, enabling them to jump to the front of the rebooking process, without standing in line or waiting on hold. The whole idea is to put travelers back in control of their flight experience.
As the numbers in commercial aviation continue to grow and airlines find reliability more elusive, disruption management and recovery is now big business, and getting out in front of a problem is the Holy Grail. “It all boils down to the fact the largest problem is the lack of communication and transparency,” says Grassanovits. “And what we’ve done is automate that communication.”
