Airline companies generally have the odds stacked against them; operating a flight on time without any untoward incidents is the result of meticulous planning and implementation, offering very little room for error. Some issues reveal themselves early enough to be solved by an astute operations control (OCC) professional, but sometimes they occur without warning. One particularly troublesome issue is having a flight full of passengers getting ready to taxi down the runway and take off into the skies, only to realize that two of the most important people onboard (the pilots) cannot – or just wi...

In the first part  Gamification: Travel Hospitality Synergies to Grow Economies  of this two part series, I had written about how hotels can take control of gamification in travel, using an effective partnership network. In this blog post, let's explore how the other parts of the ecosystem will function, and how technology can be used to enable the synergies.   Gamification for hotel guests: A summary ​ The hotel initiates a "game" for their guest to "play", the objective of which is to ensure that the guest has a comprehensive thematic experience, as well as ensuring better sha...

It is the classic example of a symbiotic relationship. A tourist attraction can welcome people from far and wide only if adequate accommodation facilities are available in the vicinity, while guests will check into a hotel only if they have a compelling reason to be in the locality. In other words, hotels enable tourism while tourism provides a basis for hotels to do business. The World Travel & Tourism Council estimates that the two sectors account for 10% of all jobs globally. The industry has outpaced the world economy in terms of percentage growth for the past six years consecutively. ...

​ Who visits Paris, France and fails to see the Eiffel Tower? Who visits Giza, Egypt without seeing the Pyramids? Who visits Agra, India and skips a trip to the Taj Mahal? Travelers who play the Treasure Hunter game will not only get the chance to visit the best places each destination has to offer, but they also gain fantastic rewards to be redeemed in flight! Two kinds of USPs for travel destinations The leisure travel industry often works on the basis of Unique Selling Points (USPs) to sell their inventory. Often, the USP of a popular tourist destination is a single point that far overshado...

​ In my previous blog post Game Changers: A reality check on air cargo today - Part I , we explored the anomalous capacity paradox as the core reason behind the decreased yield in the cargo industry. As profitability dips, the most viable solution for the sustenance of the industry begins with increasing productivity of output and must proceed through intense customization of product. Technology, or more specifically digitization, is not a mere enabler here but the very foundation on which the industry must be rebuilt. IATA proposed to achieve this in 2016 through a portfolio of transformation...