Beyond Launch: Managing a Multi-Vendor Offer & Order Ecosystem for Commercial Advantage

[Music] Hello and welcome to T2RL Talks Conference Special Edition. And for this edition of the podcast, we're talking to Flyer, who is the knowledge sponsor for T2RL Engage 2026, which makes them very important people in our book. And from Flyer, we have Sam Chamberlain, who is the Chief Product Officer of Flyer. And joining us in the conversation, we have my friend and colleague, Bert Craven, who is our Head of our Technology Practice and Deputy CEO at T2RL. And to start the conversation, I want you to cast your mind back to T2RL Engage 2025, when both Sam and Rago Kananki from Riyadeh were on stage talking to Bert. And at that time, we were expecting Riyadeh to go live sort of any minute now. Obviously, Riyadeh had a few delays, happily none of them caused by the technology. They were caused by waiting for aircraft deliveries. But Riyadeh has now gone live. And really, I'd like to ask both Sam and Bert, but Sam first, to reflect on the process of getting Riyadeh to that landmark. And what did everybody learn in the process? And maybe what reflections do you have on what led up to that occasion? Yeah, that's a great question. The flyer team have been working nonstop over the last couple of years in this build, build, build mentality, which is go from really nothing. Because remember, we were not going from a legacy product and converting it. We were true Greenfield, Greenfield from the technology perspective, and the customer Greenfield from the airline perspective. We build a platform for offer an order that survives the future, and they build an airline that's going to be very, very different. And so, you know, I think, Rago and I talked last year about what that journey looked like over the course of 18 months getting to live. And it was definitely, you know, a long, hard slog. There was definitely challenges we had to overcome. There was a lot of sleepless nights. And I'm sure there was a few tantrums and tears here and there as well. But we got to, we got to that point where we could let this go into production and demonstrate that it works and to sort of late last year. That's a really interesting milestone because it's not something we've got to now where we're saying, right, the airline's going live, they're launching their opening this up to the public. And therefore our technology is now subject to a true test. That true test really happened in October when we put this into production. We've read air with a limited and sort of private audience, if you like. And the great sort of value and lessen itself out of that is that you get this sort of trial period or TV and settling period where it is a, you know, a limited audience. Not completely off the hook as a vendor and a software provider, passengers are creating orders. They're buying services and products from the airline. They need to be checked into flights and travel. So all of this is operationally true. But it allowed us to a little bit of breathing space to go and sort of address things. So and maybe we'll talk a little bit more about this. What's really happened during that time, then is a real sort of paradigm shift from adding features one after another to build out platform to now. How do you actually run this in production? How do you actually scale this? How do you make the software and the platform sustainable? How do you deal with those things that no amount of planning in the world could have could have kind of prepared you for you only you only realize it when a passenger stood in front of an agent at the airport. And that's where we are now. We're in that mode of like kind of quick response, keeping our SLA's in check and making sure that we can actually scale things. Okay, so so Bert, of any one not actually part of the organization concern, you've probably been as close to this development as anyone I can think of. What are your reflections on the sort of last couple of years leading up to this live implementation? Yeah, well, I mean, I think first of all, huge congratulations to flyer and the RIAD air team. I mean, I think I first met RIAD air when there were three employees and people from from Piff in Saudi. And an absolutely massive undertaking starting way back in 2022 to basically set up this airline from nothing. And a huge testament, I think, to the boldness of the vision and the credibility and capability of the delivery and making it happen. The huge number of naysayers along the way, who have, you know, I think have now seen this airline go live not in a limited way, but in all of the channels in the GDS direct in direct digital channels mobile app, AI assistance, all sorts of things have come out of this monumental effort. And I think it's just it's going to be really interesting to see now them build on this because I think, you know, even even the the most stoic naysayer has now got stand back and say, okay, well, let's have a look at where the value really comes from because this has to be an example for the whole industry. I think there's too many people who say, oh, well, it doesn't count because it's a start up or it doesn't count because of, you know, any any reason they can think of, but the reality is we have this amazing hybrid platform running we have interline partners we have all you know all of the things that people said, that's going to be impossible. And there's no you can't just bridge legacy and modern airline retailing out of the box and turns out with a lot of effort you can. So this is really an amazing sandbox now to start looking at where the promise of this value can come from and I you know I'm really looking forward to hearing from from salmon from ragu about about the value because I think that's what we're all about this year is is we had all of these expectations. And hopes and dreams for for new sources of value and new ways of achieving value and now finally we've got a platform to try it out on. Okay, so Sam, but hinted at something there which is value and finding value possibly in unexpected places has there been anything of that come up in in the work at Riyadh air so far. What we've what we've really found is that maybe less about unexpected places and more about just value can come a lot faster and these ideas that the airline has about things that they they want to do that airlines could never do in the past in a in a legacy technology stack are actually truly achievable but are achievable long timescales that are probably a bit unimaginable compared to to where the industry was or even has been up until now or in the past. It's things like being able to assemble product offering far more dynamically and curated for passengers with personalization and with you know more data signals and inputs taken into account in time frames that are measured in. Potentially hours as opposed to well I now have to think through how this is going to be distributed because it can only be distributed this way through this channel or it can't be distributed through this channel at all. I have to go to third party organizations to manage that distribution and I have to file and wait for things to be approved and on all of these things that talk weeks and months to launch new products or or things that now take. Minutes or hours and although we knew that wasn't a surprise. Actually seeing it in reality and seeing it happen is is maybe satisfaction let's say rather than rather than surprise and so yeah the speed and the time to value has become sort of a true. Substantiated proof point that happen and then things like being able to service a passenger better and more seamlessly because you know everything is now that fingertips and available to to the agent or the passenger themselves. So of the notion of one order and a unified record and a single source of truth there is no now collection of parts that may or may not exist it's all it's all assembled together and this idea of channel like no sticism which means that it doesn't really matter where it originated and device agnosticism it doesn't really matter. So if you're using your mobile phone or your desktop browser or whether it's a thrown agent or through the web or whatever and it'll bring you to the same source of truth that has already started to show the providing a better experience to a passenger is absolutely possible. So one of the things that the idea that comes from this speed and simplicity and the ability to make these changes quickly is that it's not just the speed it unlocks it's the flexibility to do experimentation rapidly. try lots of things, has that shown through? Is there now a good platform for experimentation at Riyadeh? - Yeah, absolutely. And it's something that, it's really interesting, because there's something that Riyadeh can decide very, very short time scales, very quickly. They can decide, their commercial teams can decide, I want to try something new. And they don't have to think through, well, what are the mechanics and processes, and how am I going to try something new? They can go and assemble a new product offering, whether it's their own products and services, or that of the partners, and they can decide what kind of distribution and audience they want to test that with. And so they have that flexibility now to go and say, I'm going to try this out in this market, or I'm going to try it from this point of sale, or I'm going to try it with this particular channel and see whether this works. And creating a product is fast, but testing it out and seeing if it works, where you expected it to work is also very fast. - I mean, that's really interesting, because anecdotally talking to people in legacy airlines, traditional airlines, what terms shall we use, and who tell stories of someone in a commercial department coming up with an idea for a product that was really just a small variation on stuff that they already sold. And IT coming back and saying, yeah, okay, well, that'll take nine months and cost you half a million dollars. That's something that other industries, I think, would find shocking. And hopefully we are moving towards a world where young folk in the airline industry will also find that shocking as we manage to develop and roll out these new ways of working. - Okay, so I'm very happy to say that we have just been joined in the studio by Rago Kananki, who I think is director of Product and IT Delivery at Riyadeh. And I apologize if I've got that title wrong. Rago, I know you've been in Riyadeh since almost the very beginning. And I wonder if I could just ask you for your reflections on the journey you've taken with Flier and with some of the other partners that you've had to get to this stage where Riyadeh is reached now. - Absolutely, thank you so much, me and T12 for this opportunity. It's a pleasure actually to join all of you this afternoon. We've had this unique opportunity that was handed to us as a part of the shareholders and essentially establishing a carrier in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It was a unique opportunity with a vision that was back with us wanting to be a digital, digital native carrier. So when we were first essentially looking at the core tenets of the airline that we were establishing, our first six months effectively was when we spent considerable amount of time essentially writing up a digital strategy. And this is when we had some of the core partners available with us, that were working closely with us to look at every individual aspect of the guest journey across commercial operations, corporate, how each of these system capabilities feed into enabling that journey. GX and EX alike both the guest experience as well as the employee experience. And from there, that's when we chalked our off-road strategy together. This is when the T12 teams started working closely with us. We started chalking out what our plan for, procurement of the systems look like and various capabilities look like. And that's essentially when we embarked on our off-road journey bringing all the right partners on board. And that's essentially how our journey with flyers effectively began. The quantum of the sound, this is probably October 2022. I think it's like, yeah, it's like yesterday, we've been working closely with flyers, with Saber, with Sutherland, with the self-point digital and number of partners, obviously flyer playing the course and the piece of being the off-road technology for us. And from there on, it's, yeah, I mean, there's no turning back. We've embarked on this strategy of building a native of full off-road or native carrier. And we are there today, is launched as a fully digitally native airline, which essentially enables us as a retail airline that's enabling experiences to our guests that have never been seen before. And the alchemy of everything that we've built is then enabled to our guests in the form of experiences such as, "Cart as a product," airlines have never seen "Cart." Airlines have never enabled the guests through their digital platforms to help manage, if Sam and I are traveling together, how Sam is able to manage his part of the journey, just as I would be able to manage my part of the journey. So it's booked together, manage individually, as we call it. And some of these core concepts themselves do exist in the airline industry today, but really the heart of it what we're doing is we are not trying to build around the existing legacy elements as they were with the PSS, but it's actually just going back and rewriting the whole of the core airline stack, but in a fully native or off-road event. So that's a classless no-rbds, no-80pcore for the direct channels and then it's a long list of ends. - It is. And one of the things that Sam was talking about before you joined us was the flexibility that the systems that you have now have given you and the ability to experiment with new products, to introduce a new product and service very quickly. And I guess you see this as part of the secret source of Riyadhere when you go into the market now and compete, you're able to do these things in a way that traditional carriers would find very difficult. - Absolutely. I think at the heart of that is also another core tenet or commercial strategy of building in the airline with the marketplace. Now this is not as pushing for, let's say, third party products as a redirect, but this is actually enabling a single order with the ability to not just persist or typical airline product as it were, but also hotels, experiences, Shoffer and the list goes on. So the flexibility of essentially starting with the offer or the capability enables us with now as Sam rightly points out, the art of possible is really just as equivalent as it is for any other retailer that there is out there in the market. So when Amazon first began in the 90s by selling books is a category they've had to evolve to supporting, I don't know, 1800, how many of our categories today, but each category has its own treatment. We have the ability, a similar ability to be able to do that with products that are relevant to our business. Just because we can, we don't. It's more of the art of possible by having this core stack being a native is what it enables. - I think I like that phrase very much, the art of the possible and I think it's something that we'll carry through this and other conversations. I wanna turn back to San though and say, what you've achieved and what you and Riyadhere have achieved together is fantastic, but you started from a blank sheet of paper and the ability to invest. How are you going to carry that forward into the thousand other airlines in the world who have an existing technology stack and an existing set of commercial processes? How are you gonna help them evolve to get to somewhere near where Riyadhere is today? - Yeah, that's a great question and it's something that comes up a lot, right? You know, it's not something you can deny and say is not a consideration or a problem to be solved. But the problem is largely solved by something sort of hiding in the Riyadhere story already, which is Riyadhere's not an island, they're a new airline, but they're not sort of on their own, they're not independent, they're a full service kind of innovative carrier that will have, does have, will have more partners both co-chair and interline close relationships with others that still operate in this legacy world. And so the technology that underpins all of that serves as this sort of translation bridge between Old World and New World is the same technology that will allow existing fully mature airlines to go and start their offer and all the journey and start to get the same kind of value that Riyadhere already starting to see as well. And we sometimes refer to this as the sort of like the magic or the black box or the silver bullet in what makes this happen. And I'd like to say it is magic, but of course it's not, it's just the outcome of well thought out, well architected and well built solution that means coexistence of standards is truly possible and therefore a PNR and a ticket world living side by side with an order and document. the world is absolutely possible. So that proof point is not specific to re-adbeing a greenfield and a new airline. It's absolutely the key and the core of what allows any airline to take this journey. And actually we've already proven on the fly-aside because we have created a production ready proofs of concepts with legacy PSS systems to demonstrate that a PNR can be fully synchronized and maintained with an order and that both can live side by side whether the booking is originating PNR first or order first. What the servicing is happening in an order or a PNR, this continuous and constant synchronization is already built out and proven. So the things that an existing mature airline has to think about are absolutely different in that there are different problems to solve but nobody is really scratching their heads on our side saying, well how do we solve this problem? Because we've already solved it and it's been substantiated. So it really is now about how do we convince airlines to take a leap of faith and actually something we just commented on a little earlier was it is absolutely relevant here which is you've got to be willing to start something and you've got to see that value comes in reasonable time frames. You know we're not going to go to an airline and say you can explore an offer and order journey and you'll start to see value in two years from now that's absolutely not a win for the airline it's not a win for flying. You should be able to start your offer and order journey and see value in once from now. So we're at T2RL we work with a lot of airlines who are thinking about setting off on this journey towards modern retailing or offer all the settle deliver. Do you think those airlines are open to the sort of proposition that Sam's putting forward here that that you know there are now known solutions for integrating into the legacy environment and moving forward? Are the airlines that we're in conversation with you know accepting of that? I think so and I hope increasingly you know they're always going to be people in any airline who have greater doubts and greater fears than others and some airlines are more risk of us and others. But I think the message here is that this same value and this same capability is within your reach you know if you find the right partners and it's it's not that you know your problem is going to be different. Every airline is different they will all tell you that they're different and they shouldn't be afraid of that difference they're going to have to solve the problems slightly differently but the reality is that the same value and the same capabilities are within their reach and there are now vendors in the market with experience of solving those problems and so I think that you know it's it's a really good object lesson for the industry that you know things that two or three years ago felt utterly insurmountable you know it felt like modern airline retailing was a sort of a distant island we could all see it but we couldn't work out get to it and now we're getting postcards from there telling us how great the the the beaches so you know I think this is really good news and I think there's there's great lessons you know different lessons for everyone but great lessons for everyone. And in terms of the theme of T2RL Engage this year it's the journey to value and Sam said a moment ago that you know getting all the way there in two or three years is not feasible but we can envisage getting starting to see the value in that kind of time frame we don't have to do everything to start seeing value we can we can do that you know not quite tomorrow but in in a matter of a few months or a year or two. So Sam and Raghu I hope you will both be with us at T2RL Engage 2026 which is happening in London in September but I know you will be with us and I hope that the the audience for this podcast will at least consider being with us my usual reminder at this stage that there is no charge for airlines to attend T2RL Engage and I hope that many many of you will take advantage of that and come and join the conversation. Sam and Raghu I know will be very happy to talk and answer questions about what they've achieved at Riyadh Air so far and also probably what they hope to achieve going forward because this is just the start of a journey really. This isn't this isn't any kind of conclusion. I think also you know if people want to experience some modern airline retailing and fancy coming via Riyadh they can now come to London on Riyadh Air. Well yeah and that is a great thing and we are very happy that London was the first international route that you've established so that's another plus for us. So right now I would like to thank Sam and I'd like to thank Raghu for coming in part way through the conversation and adding to it immediately and as always thank Bert for his contribution and thank you for listening and I look forward to talking to all of you again in the next issue of T2RL Talks.