The Middle East is really an interesting region and we are seeing a lot of innovation coming out the region, says Fiona Shanley, chief customer and marketing officer, Travelport, in an interview.
Excerpts from the interview:
"I am still learning the region, this is my fourth visit this year. We see high online penetration, high mobile penetration which is driving the thinking of businesses in this region, but at the highest level what I hear from our customers around the world are probably similar themes.
The themes are:
• Help me sell more, give me the content that my customers really want, relevant content, bookable content, breath of content that will make my business be attractive to my customer.
• Help me be more efficient on how I run my business, help me take cost out, help me to automate, help me to make my selling time a bigger portion of what I spend my time on.
• To help them engage the customer in a fuller deeper way and certainly our mobile propositions are a big part of that.
• Finally, the fourth biggest topic we hear our customers wanting support around is insight, help me understand the needs of my customer so that I can personalise what I am delivering to that customer, and make smarter choices of how I run my business and what I offer to my customers. Help me be more intelligent.
"So, these are to common things globally, and certainly these are themes that I have heard from the customers attending this event.
"The pace of change around us generally is just extreme, the world is changing fast, and we all need to think about how we can adapt amongst all this change. You need to understand how you can change before being disrupted, and how you can pick the elements of technology that can help you be a better business. But its complex, it’s also probably quite scary for all of us in terms of what does this change means.
"One of our big focus on the mobile space, is how we can ensure that the types of solutions that we have been delivering to large airlines, to large agencies over the last three or four years, is how can we now make those solution accessible to smaller agencies/airlines and we just brought out a suite of products that does precisely that gives more out of the box solution that allows them to have a mobile presence in a very full and rich way for a very small investment and we have seen market reaction to those solutions be very strong."