Travel expert interview: David Scowsill

Today, we are starting a new series of interviews with industry experts on the Venere Travel Blog: welcome to Travel Industry Rockstars!

The first rockstar on stage is David Scowsill, whose impressive resume includes high profile positions in the travel industry. David was CEO of Opodo; Senior VP Sales, Marketing and IT at Hilton International; Managing Director EMEA at American Airlines; Regional General Manager Asia/Pacific at British Airways and Sales and Marketing Director at easyJet airlines.

He is now working on specific deals in the retail, technology and travel industries for Private Equity and Venture Capital and is Chairman of Yuuguu Limited, non-executive Vice Chairman at World Hotels AG, non-executive Director of On the Beach Holidays and last but not least: non-executive Director here at Venere.com.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your fabulous career?

Studying languages at University and taking vacation jobs with inbound tour operators and cruise companies took me into the travel industry with British Airways. I have worked in various sales, marketing and general management roles with BA, American Airlines, Hilton Hotels, Opodo, easyJet airlines and Manchester Airports Group.

Having worked in large established corporations that have been household brands for many years, I am really enjoying being a non-executive director taking younger organisations through the changes required to turn them into a larger, profitable businesses.

What were some of the most interesting moments in the early part of your travel career?

There are so many different ones spread over the years – waking up in a railway siding with 120 American high school students when the railway company uncoupled the carriages from the train; flight planning for a transatlantic aircraft using a circular slide rule and meteorological charts to calculate the fuel needed; telling a large Texan oil rigger in Saudi Arabia that he was not going home for Christmas as his flight was overbooked; night shifts in Mumbai airport, sending teletype messages from an old telex machine; living with a bodyguard in Venezuela, who only had a gun between 3.00 and 4.00am and was not given any bullets…

What were the technology ‘moments’ that impacted you personally?

VHF radio conversation with a Captain, telling him to divert to another airport for an engine change, despite the fact that my girlfriend was on board; mainframe computer systems that allowed extensive planning and data storage capability; early laptop computers with integrated printers weighing around 15kg; planning the rebuild of a bombed out office in Bogota, using a facsimile machine for exchanging plans; sitting in a hotel in Saigon, e mailing for free all day to the world, when it was impossible to get a telephone connection call through within the city; grasping mobile telecommunications with its complete loss of privacy and freedom, with early mobile telephones that had battery packs the size of bricks; understanding the power of this US government communication and networking system, which became available to the public as the internet; riding the wave from print to digital photography; seeing the arrival of mobile PDA devices, and the blackberry being used on holiday on the beach; using Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, screen sharing and conference calling with www.yuuguu.com to be completely office free in my daily working life….

What have been the key major technology changes that have shaped the travel industry?

Automation and processing power of mainframe computers for airlines, hotels and tour operators; property management systems and central reservations for hotels; airline inventory, reservations and pricing systems; GDS for business and leisure travel agencies; yield management systems for airlines, hotels, car rental and now car parks; huge databases for frequent flyer programmes and e mail marketing; internet distribution and rich content supply ; screen scraping, extranets, API and XML connectivity; video streaming and mobile content…

If you had to pick just one, what would you say is the biggest adjustment the travel industry has had to make in the last 15 years due to technology evolution and increasingly savvy consumers?

No question that it is the pervasive power of distribution provided by the internet that has changed the travel industry for ever. Private communication networks have existed for many years, such as SITA for the airlines’ operational messaging needs. The internet has provided a paradigm shift for the industry: opening up a consumer direct channel of distribution; providing an online advertising capability, better targeted than offline; reducing dramatically agents commissions, as consumers buy direct from suppliers; providing rich content for hotels to sell their product; initiating user-generated content and reviews; changing the world of telecommunications with VOIP; launching weblogs, travelpods, wikis, RSS feeds and social networking sites; providing a platform for companies that are shaping our future – Google, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, iTunes and the next generation that people have still not conceived.

Take out your crystal ball! With lots of information readily available to online travel shoppers, what will be the ultimate factor to drive users to one online travel distributor rather than the other?

I do not foresee a time when one online travel distributor will be able to cater for all the travel requirements of a user. This is partly due to the innate promiscuity of shoppers, but mainly that online distributors all specialise in different things – scheduled air, low cost carriers, hotel, car, tour products, business travel, groups. No one global player can satisfy the annual needs of consumers, when they are travelling for different reasons at different times of the year – package ski trip, city break on a low cost carrier, business class air fare, coach trip to a theatre… Additionally, country based or regional players are more adept at satisfying the demands of their consumers, catering not just to language but cultural needs and travel habits.

The web has brought transparency of pricing, but consumers still have a need to shop around online in the same way that they do on in shopping malls. Price fluctuations by the minute mean that a consumer cannot always ‘trust’ his or her preferred site to produce the best price/value proposition. If finding the right hotel is your overriding driver in planning a leisure or business trip, then you might lead off with venere.com in your search. If you know that flights are likely to be more complicated, then you may book the flights months in advance and worry about the hotel later. If there is one factor that will help web-sites dominate, it will be the quality and depth of their unique content, supported by an intuitive site that your grandmother could use…

Are traditional travel agencies dying out?

The impact of 9/11 was profound throughout the world, but particularly in the travel industry. The airlines were flying empty aircraft, with huge fixed costs of operation, and collectively they lost around $25bil in the 12 months post 9/11. They seized on the internet as a way of dramatically reducing the costs of distributing through GDS and travel agencies. Agency fees in USA were removed and leisure and business travel agents either re-engineered their model and consolidated with others, or they went out of business. Northern Europe followed soon after, with many shopping mall and high street retail locations being closed as agents cut back their costs to compete.

Traditional agencies will not die out, as long as they are providing a personalised, value added service, that customers are happy to pay a fee for. There will be fewer of them, but they will provide great service in their shops or on the telephone. In Southern Europe, Middle East, Asia and Latin America, the traditional travel agents still sell far more than the online players, and this will take some years before it shifts to the same balance as the USA.

Web 2.0 and travel: true love?

I am indebted to Markus Angermeier, who produced a mind map in 2005 that attempted to explain all the potential elements on Web 2.0 - When you look at all the elements captured on his mind map, it goes some way to describing why travel is such ideal sector to exploit the trends of Web 2.0.

The power of long tail economics means that any niche travel business can distribute its product on the internet, in a way that previously was impossible. When I took a travelpod feed onto my desktop before Facebook and MySpace, I started to receive travelpod pictures posted by various Australian and New Zealand globetrotters, taken at the midnight beach party in Phuket. It was not quite what I had in mind when I ticked the ‘travel’ box, but again it showed the power of the internet for sharing information in a timely, focussed manner.

The travel sites that find the right balance between hard selling from their real estate, combined with providing a mash-up of content from other relevant content sources, will be the ones that grow market share and survive in the longer term.

What is your favourite travel destination?

I have been lucky to live, work in or visit most parts of the world. Each place has unique memories for different reasons. If I had to pick one, it would be Malaga in the South of Spain. It is the entry point to so many different aspects of Spanish life – beaches of the Costa Luz; night life of Marbella and Puerto Banus; culture and architecture of Malaga, Sevilla, and Granada; windsurfing and kite surfing off the glorious beaches near Tarifa; skiing in the Sierra Nevada; seeing pure flamenco and the Alhambra palace in Granada; picking olives in Competa; wining and dining in Benahavis….

Topic:  Travel Industry Rockstars | 3 Comments
Tags:  travel industry, Venere

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