Dr. Nejib Ben-Khedher / Head of Emirates Skywards on 0:00 - on current focus of Emirates Skywards • 3:10 - on relaunch of Skywards Everyday app • 5:30 - on launch of new features for Skyward members (meals pre-order, expanding film collection, offering Wi-Fi) • 8:47 - on biggest challenges for Emirates in the coming 12-18 month and tech transformation • 12:10 - on need to upgrade tech stack to overlay new technologies 13:20 - on technologies that Emirates sees potential in.
GLO
0:00 – on current focus of Emirates Skywards
3:10 – on relaunch of Skywards Everyday app
5:30 – on launch of new features for Skyward members (meals pre-order, expanding the movie and film collection, offering Wi-Fi on all routes).
8:47 – on biggest challenges for Emirates in the coming 12-18 month and tech transformation
12:10 – on need to upgrade tech stack to overlay new technologies
13:20 – on technologies that Emirates sees potential in
Read transcript
0:00
GLO: Dear Dr. Nejib it’s great to see you at the World Aviation Festival in 2023 in Lisbon and thank you so much for finding time to share insights with the Global Loyalty Organization members. Thank you again for supporting us with Emirates being one of our members. The first day of the conference focused on several main trends in aviation: big data, new technologies, a rise of partnerships, and retail opportunities. What has been the focus of the Emirates and Skywards in the last 12 months?
Dr. Nejib Ben-Khedher, Emirates Skywards: Anastasia, thank you for the opportunity again to talk to the members. Probably relaunching the Skywards Everyday App was a way for us to engage with our partners on a daily basis, providing them access to about 200 partners and 1,000 outlets today in Dubai. It may extend to other geographies, and strategic markets, where we operate, but that again goes with this trend of trying to connect with the members, who are infrequent travelers even on a daily basis, and be top of their minds as well. Skywards Everyday is one of the examples of the app launch, which delivers a smooth experience through card linking for people to earn with partners in Dubai. But we’re also expanding our Skywards Miles Mall offering which gives you access to more than 2,000 Partners. We have it in the UAE, we have it in the US, strategic markets like the UK, and now we’ve expanded to India and Australia so the platform is going to be a platform offering earn and burn opportunities with those players as well. This talks about how we’re expanding the partnership ecosystem to into the lifestyle category.
You talked about other trends and we can just touch on them – for example on AI and leveraging data. We’re encouraging our members to log in when they’re shopping on our platform we have incentives that we provide our members depending on the flight their shopping in and their status, etc. Whereby we just customize a little bit of offerings that we have in the form of incentives like special ‘Cash Plus Miles’ rates, for example, while they are in the funnel and shopping. We want to be able to provide them with incentives that are attractive enough for them to convert during the session and we’ve seen conversions go up. I’m saying this because the next real step for us is to be able to leverage AI and machine learning to be able to further customize these offers and to make them quite interesting.
GLO: I know it’s maybe too early to judge the Everyday loyalty app as it was relaunched in May this year, but how do the first three months go? Did it meet your expectations? Did it exceed your expectations? Did you see some of the conclusions that you didn’t expect after the app relaunch?
Dr. Nejib Ben-Khedher, Emirates Skywards: What’s very interesting is a card linking. We moved away from any cash transactions and obviously, we lost some of the partners that we had in the former Skywards Everyday App but the interesting part is that the partners where we have frequent transactions, like Costa Coffee, have people who link their cards. It’s just so simple, every time I know it’s micro-earning but it adds up. If you drink your coffee twice a day or once a day, you get the 10 miles or so that you are earning. What we’re seeing is that some supermarkets, coffee shops, etc, where there is a lot of frequent spending, are now becoming prominent in our App.
We have the likes of F&B on the fine dining side but also on the casual dining, where we have more frequent transactions that are happening today. We have about 30,000 members who are engaged on the platform and every time we have one that links their card they just forget about it. They just have to walk into the store and the transaction is recorded and then the miles are delivered and it’s the virtual cycle of frequency. Your first earn creates that whole virtual cycle where we going to be earning more and then obviously getting closer to your aspirational rewards. Once we have them on board and by the way it is very important for us to communicate to our members so that they know of the existence of this the programs are getting richer and richer. In terms of offering, we have to find a way to engage with the members and communicate to them what the program has to offer because we find out that a lot of our members don’t know and we’ve got to do that. Hopefully, we’ll do a better job at communicating with them apart from launching the Everyday app.
GLO: Emirates launched several new features for their Skyward members. Among those are upgrading some of the inflight experiences, such as offering pre-orders for the meals on the planes, significantly expanding the movie and film collection, and offering Wi-Fi on all routes. These definitely elevate the level of experience for Emirates’ clients. These steps are taken because customers became more demanding after COVID-19 or are effectively Emirates trying to stay ahead of the competition?
Dr. Nejib Ben-Khedher, Emirates Skywards: As a loyalty program we’re blessed to work for an airline like Emirates. They do most of the heavy lifting for us providing the experience that you just talked about and continuing to innovate as well and to upgrade the experience as well I think it is driven mostly by the vision. Take, for example, customer experience and pushing the boundaries with the introduction of a premium economy. While on its own this concept existed with other airlines, once you try our premium economy product you see that it is quite unique. We by the way have an AUD 2 billion dollar refurbishment program for our fleet that doesn’t include only the premium economy, but also refurbishing of the first class, business class, and
economy seating as well. We continue to invest in the product you’ve mentioned: upgrading some of our lounges, you mentioned pre-ordering meals and in-flight entertainment. All of that makes it easier for Skywards to acquire members.
From a Skywards perspective, while we are growing by nearly 300,000 members a month, we want to ensure that our premium members receive exclusive benefits. You mentioned Wi-Fi, which is available for all Skywards members but also for premium members and unlimited packages on certain cabins. Just a couple of weeks ago we introduced home check-in for our platinum members whereby we’re removing any hustle they can have at the airport by having somebody come and pick up their luggage and providing them with boarding passes so they can just walk through the airport seamlessly. We continue to elevate the experience for our premium members as well in the air but also in non-air experience, because we are blessed to have so many sponsorships – so we leverage those sponsorships to be able to provide exclusive benefits to our members. As a matter of fact, the platform that offers this is called Skywards Exclusives and it offers these curated experiences, non-air experiences, to our members as well.
GLO: It is quite interesting to hear this because what surprised me at this year’s World Aviation Festival was how many stands were for the full customer journey providers – from bag tags, and air tags to different features and apps that allow customers to feel more comfortable through the journey. If you look at the coming 12-18 months, what will be the biggest challenge and the opportunity for Emirates?
Dr. Nejib Ben-Khedher, Emirates Skywards: We continue to grow the program and members and we continue to provide people with more earning opportunities. Our biggest challenge is to continue to be able to reward our members and the premium ones in particular – to provide them access to rewards flights. As I mentioned working closely with our colleagues to be able to offer more access to seats. I want to mention that we have ‘Cash Plus Miles’ which you can think of as a dynamic classic reward, where you can actually book any seat at any time in any cabin. Using Cash Plus Miles or converting (by the way we’ve increased that conversion rate) as well to make it more attractive for our members. So for me, it’s important to continue to provide these reward benefits.
The second challenge we have is around upgrading our technology. We have taken on a massive transformation from a technology perspective with a partner we’re working it’s a 2-year program where we’re going to overhaul our technology and the back end of it so we can introduce things like unbundled benefits. Today’s technology doesn’t allow us to do that. Also, we would like to interact with the downstream systems because as we introduce new benefits – our operations team needs to be aware of these benefits and we need to find a way to seamlessly provide that experience to our customers and also provide the right communication to our front-end staff be at the retail contact center or at the airport. It is very important for us – the technology piece as an enabler and that overhaul is important.
The third challenge for us I wouldn’t say it’s a challenge – it’s something that you know a lot of airlines are waking up to but at least we have we have really invested in this area for the past 3-4 years and its whole fraud prevention piece. As currency and miles are becoming more and more ubiquitous currencies are being used and sought after by a number of rough players. It’s important for us to protect our members but also to ensure that people are adhering to the T&Cs of our programs – that they’re not buying miles in the so-called black market or darknet and then making sure that you know the right member is using their miles for their rewards. So fraud prevention is extremely important for us as well and we’re investing heavily in making that happen.
GLO: Day one and day two of the conference were full of discussions on the implementation or desperate need for the implementation and upgrade of technology systems, several panelists highlighted that some of the technologies are from the 1960s and it’s extremely hard to put the gamification, personalization on pretty much ‘paper systems’.
Dr. Nejib Ben-Khedher, Emirates Skywards: Our system is not that historical, it’s actually from 2000, when we implemented our technology for loyalty and it’s about time after 23 years to upgrade. We have to upgrade if we want to introduce a level of AI personalized offering if you want to gamify your interaction with your members, especially the younger generation, who are used to this when they’re interacting with other players not just airlines but other players as well. I think it is very important for us to have that enabler technology to be able to implement all of this. It’s a big massive undertaking but we had to do it for the reasons that you just talked about.
GLO: If you look in the coming 12-24 months do you feel there is one particular technology that you have to implement regardless of the cost to be able to stay ahead of the competition or that the customers are demanding?
Dr. Nejib Ben-Khedher, Emirates Skywards: There’s a lot of people talking about generative AI. For us, it’s something that could be helpful when we engage with our customers – providing them with the right information and getting them to engage with us in natural language as the programs are gaining complexity. This will be a way for us to simplify interaction with them and be able to provide them with information at their fingertips so they know how they can optimize the earning of their miles and how can they use their miles for rewards. We have to be cautious of how we’re using data so we ensure that our member data is safeguarded.
One item that I need to mention is early fraud prevention – e.g. blockchain. It is also interesting, especially within a broader ecosystem of partners that we are creating so these are some of
the technologies that have been out there that are maturing and that we will be able to probably leverage and use going forward along with working on our backend system which is again a massive undertaking itself but we could work with some of these technologies.
GLO: Would you say that loyalty in 2024 will become even more important for organizations compared to the last two years?
Dr. Nejib Ben-Khedher, Emirates Skywards: There are different schools of thought about loyalty. The flights are full and some wonder whether they need a loyalty program because the brand and the travel demand are so big that the flights are getting full anyway. I think loyalty is important for us to secure whoever is flying with us to stay loyal to the airline and come back. I think we have this commercial contribution but most importantly we have this emotional contribution as well – the link that we can create as a program. I talked about the curated experiences that we’re offering – some of these exclusive experiences provided only to our members. Loyalty will continue to be that emotional connection that we can create with members once they have savored the brand and flown with us so that we can keep them coming back.
GLO: It’s really great to see that loyalty can stay forever. Thank you for your insights and hope to see you at the next World Aviation Festival.
Source: GLO
