AIRLINES & ALLIANCES

GLO Interview: Natalie Doutres & Gokce Evirgen on Amadeus’ loyalty solutions (Full episode)

00:00 About Amadeus' loyalty capabilities • 01:59 Three pillars of building a winning loyalty solution •
06:24 About dynamic pricing • 09:00 About personalisation • 11:22 About partnerships • 12:36 The magic wand question • 13:51 The main takeaways from Amadeus Loyalty Customer Forum

GLO

00:00 About Amadeus’ loyalty capabilities

01:59 Three pillars of building a winning loyalty solution

06:24 About dynamic pricing

09:00 About personalisation

11:22 About partnerships

12:36 The magic wand question

13:51 The main takeaways from Amadeus Loyalty Customer Forum

Transcript

00:00 

GLO: Dear Natalie and Gokce, it’s a pleasure to meet you at Amadeus’ beautiful headquarters in southern France. Thank you for inviting Global Loyalty Organization.

We had two wonderful days at Amadeus’ Loyalty Customer Forum, with over 15 of your airline customers attending to discuss the latest trends and solutions in loyalty, retailing, and customer experience. You offer loyalty solutions and rewards propositions at Amadeus, but Amadeus also provides other solutions to the airlines. Can you guide us through how loyalty and rewards are plugging into the overall Amadeus offering?

Nathalie Doutres, Head of Project Management Rewards, Amadeus: What we see now is that everyone understands that loyalty is an integral part of the customer journey. And in that sense, it’s key to the airline transformation. At Amadeus, what we propose is a loyalty system that is native and a reward system that is native. Those two systems are now plugged into the reservation system, the PSS, the past, as we say, and of course, we plan to put all of these capabilities and much more onto the retailing platform that we call Nevio.

Gokce Evirgen, Product Manager Loyalty, Amadeus: I would like to talk about the loyalty aspect. Our loyalty solutions allow you to build personalised campaigns and communicate special offers. Billing and partner onboarding solutions are also part of our loyalty management offering. We share all the data with our clients so that they can manage the customer journey.

01:59 

GLO: I love the phrase you put in one of the slides: “Loyalty counts.” You also shared stats that potentially the revenue from loyal members is three times higher than that of non-members of the airline. If we dive into the loyalty rewards and solution offering, what features does it have to boost airline revenue and customer satisfaction?

Nathalie Doutres, Head of Project Management Rewards, Amadeus: We focus on three pillars when we build our products. We aim to increase profitability and elevate the member journey by optimising the rewards and the price in miles of the offer whilst boosting engagement. We can give a practical example to show how we are achieving this. First, we offer a seamless and contextualised member experience on the website (This is when the customer chooses the airline. So we need to provide a personalised experience, and you can only do it if you know your customer). Then, we focus on elevating the member journey. How do we do that? We aim to eliminate the steps when you receive a campaign via email and you have to copy and paste your discount into the website. We push the offer directly onto the website to elevate the member journey. Lastly, we focus on the optimisation of the reward price. So, with all of this, we create a win-win situation where the customer is satisfied, and the airline is profitable because they control everything.

Gokce Evirgen, Product Manager Loyalty, Amadeus: As you mentioned, loyalty programs and airlines can empower themselves with real-time benefit adaptation by knowing their customers. This means you can push relevant offers to your members when booking. You can also dynamically upgrade members’ tiers by calculating their tier points at the time of buying the ticket and tailoring your communication according to their data.

05:04

GLO: One of the amazing examples you shared on this forum is your case study into how the web pages look between non-members and members. Your question was, “Spot the difference”. That was quite an eye-opener and made us realise that there is so much low-hanging fruit.

Gokce Evirgen, Product Manager Loyalty, Amadeus: Indeed, on most of the airlines’ websites, when you are booking or buying a ticket, you will see that when you log in, there is only just the name, surname, maybe tier information and the balance information and nothing else. And when you choose a ticket, you will see nothing. It is the experience and the missed opportunity for the airlines. They could offer you a tier upgrade, prompting you to choose the higher revenue tickets, which will give you more points or more promotions, vouchers, or whatever you can think of as a loyalty benefit. So, it is a part of the real-time benefit adaptation that we offer.

06:24

GLO: Natalie, you were talking about the reward pricing approach. Is it similar to the dynamic pricing discussion that is currently dominating the loyalty industry, or does Amadeus have a different view on this?

Nathalie Doutres, Head of Project Management Rewards, Amadeus: It is going into the direction of the retailing concept, and the keyword again is optimisation, and yes, we are going into the dynamicity, so the price doesn’t have to be fixed. The price has to be adapted to the situation and the person, according to what he can afford. How much do I want to sell it as an airline? I put myself in the shoes of an airline, and this magic combination makes the selling of seats possible and the repeated selling possible.

GLO: Do you think the customers will be happy if they know that the customer next to them bought the seat for half price or half the amount of miles?

Nathalie Doutres, Head of Project Management Rewards, Amadeus: Well, in fact, this it’s not as simple. If he buys it at half the price, he will have less service because he will need less. For example, as a mom of two, I know I cannot afford a reward seat if I travel. I don’t have enough miles because I’m not a frequent flyer. I don’t have enough miles to afford a full reward seat, but I would be very happy to get an extra seat, for example, for my kids to play on the plane. A business traveler won’t have the same needs, so it’s about needs adapted to a price. Hence, it is all about personalisation in the end.

08:06  

GLO: Gokce, can we look at integrating the loyalty and reward solutions into the airline’s systems? Is it through APIs, or is it through the Amadeus native system? How long does it take, and what’s your experience with that?

Gokce Evirgen, Product Manager Loyalty, Amadeus: On the technical side, several APIs can be provided to the airlines or their partners, which they can use. Alternatively, they can use our native loyalty system. Sometimes customers do not want to implement the whole solution, so we provide and offer them just the APIs which makes the system more modular.

09:00 

GLO: Natalie, one of the things that Amadeus highlighted in yesterday’s presentation is the personalisation and seamless experience for customers. You had an amazing phrase saying that ‘one size fits none’. How do Amadeus loyalty and reward solutions help to solve this challenge?

Nathalie Doutres, Head of Project Management Rewards, Amadeus: Indeed, as you say, one size fits none. Nowadays, this is a key statement. What we suggest at Amadeus is that when you enter the airline website, the airline becomes your co-pilot on the trip. So, as an airline, you need to know the customer; you need to be able to inspire him based on his past trips, his current mileage balance, his current situation, his needs and means. The idea is really to propose one or several packages that we know match his needs. For example, we could offer a package with a flight, hotel, car and several possible means of payment because we know he is used to paying with miles. If we know he can afford it with only miles, we could propose he pay only with miles. If he wants, he can just unselect some –  maybe the car because he doesn’t want to rent a car – and once he has made his selection based on our recommendation, he just has to make the one-click payment, and it’s done. We really want to facilitate the decision and to show the customer that we know him. Also, what is very important is that if he’s a frequent flyer, he may have an upgrade voucher. In this case, we would tell him “You have an upgrade voucher. Do you want to use it? It will expire at a certain date if you don’t use it.” We don’t force him but remind him of the discount and available benefits. We just embedded it into the customer journey because the journey doesn’t start when you get on the flight. It starts when you have the idea to make the trip.

11:22 

GLO: Gocke, many airlines are expanding partnerships, and it’s one of the main themes currently in loyalty. What role do partnerships play in the Amadeus loyalty solution?

Gokce Evirgen, Product Manager Loyalty, Amadeus: Partnerships are very important for the profitability of the airline. At Amadeus Loyalty Management, we have options to onboard the partners easily to the system. Airlines are constantly struggling to onboard new partners to communicate with them. We can provide them with APIs so they can easily apply to the programs, and they can be accepted or rejected easily. Also, after they are enrolled on the program, we have a massive configuration system that can be configured very easily, and it has many features that the administrator using the loyalty management system can use to make the necessary configurations within the system.

12:36 

GLO: At Amadeus Loyalty Customer Forum, we touched upon quite a few of the latest technologies that open new boundaries for loyalty and rewards programs, such as big data analysis, AI, chat GPT, predictive analytics, etc. If you had a magic wand and you could implement any of these technologies without any limits on the budget, what would it be?

Nathalie Doutres, Head of Project Management Rewards, Amadeus: I’m sure I would choose AI because the customer wants to be inspired and have ideas. With the richness of the data, I think that the use of AI on airline websites would be a very powerful tool for the loyalty members who are planning a trip. At this moment we don’t really know when they have a limited budget or they have a big budget, or they have kids, or they don’t have kids, or it’s business, or it’s not business. You know, they really need a co-pilot, a virtual and smart partner, because in real life, it’s not always the case.

13:51

GLO: It was quite an inspiring event with a lot of feedback from airlines and participants. If you had to name one takeaway from the event for yourself and your team, what would that be?

Nathalie Doutres, Head of Project Management Rewards, Amadeus: For me, it’s quite clear that loyalty in the travel industry is not just about a transaction, and it is not only about profit, but it is all about emotion. We see that the emotionally connected customers, the one the airline sell dreams to, will be the more loyal because nowadays, we see that emotions are more and more important because they are more and more rare so this is something we cannot ignore in our industry

14:46

GLO: Thank you so much for your insights. And looking forward to any new solutions and challenges that can help the customers.

Nathalie Doutres, Head of Project Management Rewards, Amadeus: Thank you.

Gokce Evirgen, Product Manager Loyalty, Amadeus: Thank you.

Source: GLO