Sabre : Is there a business case for airline digital transformation?

This article is the second piece in a series from Sabre.

The Business Problem

If you want to operate in a digital world, you must become a digital company. Becoming a digital company, however, requires new strategies built around new types of innovation and creativity, new processes to support the new strategies, and a keen focus on the digital customer and the overall customer experience.

In short, most aspects of human society have become digital, and businesses that haven't already made the digital transformation to keep up with their competition and please their customers should follow suit. Or, risk losing valuable customers to competitors. This is the potential loss of revenue. This is the business case. Digitalize or die.

The Technology Needed to Move Faster Toward Digital Transformation

To begin down the digital transformation path, airlines need to be able to bring together disparate data sets, so they can identify events across their entire organization in real-time and quickly respond to market needs, customer demand, irregular operations and so on.

Specifically, the airline enterprise must become connected to uncover intelligent insights and take relevant action. Because many of these systems don't currently have the intelligence and/or ability to communicate with each other, an airline can't access the right information at the right time and in the right places.

'Data analytics that helps airlines learn about travelers and what they want will produce winners and losers among airlines,' said Cathay Pacific Airways Chairman John Slosar. 'There are network effects; the guys that get there first will have an advantage.'

In short, compiling the right data from the customer journey (inclusive of the PSS, CRM, Loyalty, Operations, and other systems), deriving insight and taking action is the key to becoming a digital native organization. More specifically, airlines need to deliver insights to frontline employees to engage with customers or down-line software applications and decision-makers to take action at scale with the insights to make the right decisions and differentiate from their competitors.

To learn more about the technology approach to digital transformation for airlines, click here.