Travel Is Your Business – travel industry podcast

063 – Marty St. George of JetBlue – Making Connections

December 13, 2018Marc Raco Leave a Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 55:28 — 63.5MB)

A visionary executive and experienced senior revenue and strategy leader in the commercial airline business offers insight into what has turned the aviation industry on its head again and again over the last 30 years…

Marty St. George, EVP of Commercial and Planning for JetBlue Airways, joins John Matson and Bess Chapman in the MouthMedia Network studios powered by Sennheiser.

In the episode:

Marty’s history with JetBlue and the Airline industry
JetBlue focus cities and outlook on growth
The fascination with bankruptcy and what he’s learned from it
Changing with the times and evolving to meet demand; From down turn to profits, low cost to premium
How customers will always dictate and pick what business model suites them
JetBlue training; everyone from baggage handlers to vice presidents share the experience
The future of the Airline industry
Maintaining the upstart attitude at a larger scale
An anecdote about Mint, and a “missed” business opportunity
The 5 core values of JetBlue and the secret sixth
White Leather 90s
What JetBlue is doing to future proof for recessions
The business vs leisure argument; which is more important
A love for building networks and the competitive nature it brings out
Data, from the new ways aircraft manufacturers are collecting it inflight to the need for protection
The mass amounts of data that are available to due regulations
The need for airlines to be more customer focused, and restructuring CRMs
Viewing JetBlue as a service business and not an operator
Overseeing JetBlue ventures; outside the box solutions from outside heads
Wouldn’t it be great to have a solution for Air-Traffic Control and the weather?
Identifying a business problem, and finding the means to properly address it
The future of JetBlue, 1 year, 5 years, and 10 years down the road, and what Marty thought JetBlue would be doing now, 10 years ago
Hush Puppies and PBRs, a guide to outlasting “hipness”
Doubling down on successes
Improved Airline safety and JetBlue’s brand new 220 aircraft
Marty’s love for all things Boston, Necco, The Patriots, The Sox, and the small city charm

062 – Darley Newman – Equitrekking the Globe

November 30, 2018Marc Raco Leave a Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 41:40 — 47.7MB)

Discovering locations around the world by horseback riding and other adventure activities with local people…

Darley Newman (travel expert, published author and the host, writer and producer of Equitrekking, the Emmy-Award winning PBS TV series, and Travels with Darley on PBS, Create TV and on AOL, MSN Travel, Huffington Post, Amazon and over 2000 partner sites) joins John Matson and Bess Chapman in the MouthMedia Network studio powered by Sennheiser.

In this episode:

Botswana
Salt pans and stargazing
Discovering experts, keeping track of them for use indifferent locations
Complicated logistics involved
Horses and their personalities
Getting charged by an elephant
Being a safari guide
Finding the right guides
Less remote areas are still unique on horseback
Something connects people because of horses
Why horses are therapeutic for both mind and body
Starting the show, how Darley manifested it, a background in journalism and behind the scenes
How she started with a website and some videos
Horses are a vehicle to get to know people and places
Creating a second show, “Travels with Darley”, started short form, and the many places to distribute content
Curating content for the right platform
How a trip-planning business came organically out of the show
The aspect of ecotourism aspect
What’s next, and the one place Darley would like to travel to next (because of the food…)

061 – Brian Altomare of LugLess – The Case for Suitcase Shipping

November 23, 2018Marc Raco Leave a Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 41:30 — 47.5MB)

A luggage shipping platform leveraging existing logistics networks, and including options such as doorstep pickup and additional coverage, with LugLess…

Brian Altomare, Director of Business Development for LugLess (a next generaton luggage shipping service), joins John Matson and Bess Chapman in the MouthMedia Network studios powered by Sennheiser.

In this episode:

The first low-cost alternative to luggage and baggage shipping fees, start at the door, not at baggage clam
Being friends to airlines
With airlines, it is possible to be an asset
The opportunity for partnerships
How LugLess doesn’t need operational help
Being in stealth beta mode for 12 months, with consistent growth
New brand, positioning, model
Can be an asset to any OTA with a booking engine
Making agreements with hotels, airlines and OTAs, or direct to consumer
API not a feature, it’s a tool
Friction – the effort to bring and do it ahead of time
Can increase service
Most are economy travelers with convenience
Insurance considerations, relationships with FedEx and UPS and DHL
Low-price shipping several bags, dynamic pricing
A mass travel economy play
LugLess is a platform to do something for less and more convenient
Strangest things shipped
Why LugLess is currently domestic only
Shark Tank and how it changed LugLess, why LugLess gutted everything, rebuilt
Low-cost, API, drop-off
Brian on making fun of himself in articles
Why LugLess didn’t rebrand
Turning negative press into a positive
Staying healthy when traveling
Feeling at home when abroad

060 – Fernando Camara of Skyhour – The Gift of Flight

November 15, 2018Marc Raco Leave a Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:45 — 41.0MB)

The next-generation gifting platform offering a smart, easy way to gift air travel…

Fernando Camara, Co-Founder and CEO of Skyhour (creating the ultimate air travel currency that powers travel across platforms and industries), joins John Matson and Bess Chapman in the MouthMedia Network studios powered by Sennheiser.

In this episode:

Gifting travel, inspiring friends to become better people, inspiring people to go to new places and get new points of view, make an impact in their lives, travel is the best thing you can do
How it started, a friend wanted to travel
$140B on gift cards and less than 1% is spent on travel
The goal of connecting giting and air travel industries
Offering flight hours for $60/hour, and the ability to apply to virtually any airline
The opportunity to crowdfund a flight
Being able to sell tickets without dates or destinations
Like creating a new currency
Getting around liabilities in some restrictions
The money goes to escrow accounts — if you don’t use the hours, the money goes back to person you gifted to
Works with Sabre for accessing the inventory of airlines
Being a JetBlue Technology Ventures portfolio company
Potential partnerships with hotel chains, clothing brands, etc.
Camara’s other companies in digital marketing, real estate, then told a friend about the Skyhour idea, and how he needed someone to help build product, and thinking about hiring agency and agency (which loved it so much, sold the company and brought best the guys in to work on it)
Why New York is the best place to launch company in the US
A $5.5M seed round, working on Series A
Raised an initial round starting with cold calls
Seasonality, ebb and flow—flight frequency varies but people give all year round
Dealing with gift card restrictions
Only make money when people book a flight
Time between buying and booking, prompting booking and re-gifting actions

059 – Tal Shalit of Betterez – RTM From the Ground Up

November 7, 2018Marc Raco Leave a Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 45:41 — 52.3MB)

Flexible, scalable cloud-based enterprise software solutions for the Reservation and Ticketing Management (RTM) space…

Tal Shalit, Founder & CEO of Betterez (a leading reservations and ticketing management solution specifically designed to address the needs of travel, transportation and admissions companies, and part of the JetBlue Technology Ventures portfolio) joins John Matson (VoyagerHQ) and Bess Chapman (JetBlue Technology Ventures) in the MouthMedia Network studios powered by Sennheiser.

In this episode:

How Shalit used to work with Porter Airlines
Learnings for bus industry – originally built a reservation system for small airlines
Customers bus brands
B to B, or B to B to C
End to end reservation system, and how acquiring brands
Selling the vision as assembling components
Omnichannel experience for operators
Getting going on any channel you need help with
An intelligent way to set it and forget it and adjust over time
An overlap for airlines
Potential for air to bus to cruise, seamless customer journey
Considering the volume of bookings and speed through any operator
How the bus industry doesn’t have the legacy infrastructure that airline or rail has — so you can leapfrog over that and jump to mobile and latest tech faster, big opportunity
The economic downturn has a positive impact on bus travel, although a downturn doesn’t stop people from moving and traveling
The bus of the future, experiences
An engine to sell tickets, reconciliation
RTM (reservation and ticket management) – many crossover opportunities, building something flexible, even for events, can get into the market even with attractions to medical equipment reservations

058 – Eric Bamberger of IgnitionOne – Consumer Insights in Hospitality

October 30, 2018Marc Raco Leave a Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 46:04 — 52.8MB)

Guiding consumer insights to build audiences, optimize marketing campaigns, collect data, and utilize life moments…

Eric Bamberger, SVP of Hospitality for IgnitionOne (an award-winning Customer Intelligence Platform enabling marketers to understand, value and engage with their customers in real-time), joins “Fashion Is Your Business” podcast hosts Pavan Bahl and Marc Raco on location at the IgnitionOne Summit in New York.

In this episode:

Data has always been important to travel and other lifestyle industries
Bigger companies operating with legacy systems, making consumer insights difficult
Department of hospitality, organizing data, making it effective with clients
IgnitionOne has a fundamental understanding of the customer journey
First party data – the data a company can personally aggregate from their site, most companies don’t even know what to do with this data much less integrating third party data
Connecting with CRM files
Starting with cookies, using tags, create a scoring algorithm
Processing in real time, which gives a leg up on others
Working primarily with enterprise customers, larger hotel chains
Reading macrotrends, such as oil and gas mining in Texas relating with a hotel occupancy standpoint, adjusting strategies to react on trend data
Messaging vs. using data to drive direct bookings
Loyalty is less important, more about saving money
IgnitionOne’s proprietary scoring algorithm, custom machine learning algorithm for each customer, get high accuracy prediction on propensity to convert, which then leads to bidding decisions
Platform, ads, the spend used defending brands—-generic type key words for searches
Everything can be an acquisition channel with the right conversion strategy
Ad experiences in personalization
Considering trends in social platform use related to driving spend and conversion, and searching for all inventory sources
The relevance of apps
New data impacts each consumer visit, various sources of info for strategy in connecting uniquely to that person
The wins in digital marketing that are possible with real effort

057 – Kelsey Recht of VenueBook – Right Space, Right Time

October 23, 2018Marc Raco Leave a Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 39:15 — 45.1MB)

Streamlining the interaction between event organizers and venues…

Kelsey Recht, CEO/Founder of VenueBook (a platform offering event venues that you can search, discover and book), joins John Matson and Bess Chapman in the MouthMedia Network studios powered by Sennheiser.

In this episode:

A look at the meeting and events industry and what drives growth
Despite digital, no substitute for in-person meetings, companies are hosting more events, but the types are changing
Different ways people thinking about meetings, how the travel industry has to adapt to changing landscape
VenueBooks’s user acquisition
The influx of accidental event planners
Circumventing issues with inventory side
Becoming skilled at helping venues skew inventory toward what is most in demand
The attention to better experiences
A focus on top notch booking experience overall, a very sophisticated platform
How VenuBook conversion rate is at 20%
Availability and pricing are generally the biggest friction.
Transparent pricing helps
Customers are in the market 45 days in advance of event, booking around 30 days in advance
Traditional hotel chains have dropped commissions with the promise of better tech tools
Making it easier/faster to book event spaces for planners and venues
Venues are top of funnel
Spinning up in new cities and with new venues, helping people think of spaces as venue spaces, giving hotels ideas for selling inventory they wouldn’t think of

056 – Allison Daniels of Virgin – Traveling and Building a Better World

October 9, 2018Marc Raco Leave a Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 44:28 — 52.0MB)

Virgin and its mission of changing (travel) business for good…

Allison Daniels, Investment Manager at Virgin (a leading international investment group and one of the world’s most recognised and respected brands), joins John Matson and Bess Chapman in the MouthMedia Network studios powered by Sennheiser.

In this episode:

Changing business for good
Taking mundane experience or pain point and turning it into something better
Making things better from sustainability to safety videos
Capital intensive investment strategy, legacy and opportunistic
Taking people to the next frontier
Virgin Voyages – new cruise business
Whensuper-expericed people live and breathe the Virgin ethos and lead a new initiative
A new way to cruise in a sector hungry for disruption, integrate health and wellness and a beautiful ship designed in part by known designers on land, making ship work for customers, technology plays a big part
A lot more to be revealed about the ships, and the ecosystem on how the ships are built and limited suppliers
How new technology and innovation can allow Virgin to make new experiences available
Opening more hotels, how fit in voyage ecosystem
Hotels have distinguishing elements making them feel very “Virgin”, such a club that makes it feel like a members club
All rooms are chambers
Ships can sail where the hotels are, an entire Virgin experience
Virgin loyalty program, and creating a structured Virgin ecosystem
Making venture investments into innovation that have synergy to the general Virgin portfolio such as Ring
How offerings are changing because you have to do better for the customer has lasted in the industry
People now know what Virgin stands for
Brands to admire

055 – Yannis Moati of Hotels by Day – Reimagining Hotel Revenue

September 8, 2018Marc Raco Leave a Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:39 — 58.1MB)

Day-use hotel rooms with early check-in as a hospitality marketing and revenue hack…

Yannis Moati, CEO of Hotels by Day (gives travelers a comfortable daytime hotel room for half the price of an overnight stay), joins John Matson and Bess Chapman in the MouthMedia Network studios powered by Sennheiser.

In this episode:

The biggest opportunity hotel revenue management – the idea of reimagining a hotel
Revenue management is a new science, becoming complex
New orthodoxies in hotel revenue creation being developed regularly
Conversation has changed from disinterest to wanting to discuss
A niche play in nascent sector
Flexibility of hotel consumption, responding to an on demand society
A rigid check-in/out schedule doesn’t work for today’s society
Protocol, tech, marketing funnel to become more flexible one step at a time, because it’s a big operation
Hotels don’t see this as hourly play – more like a block of time
Types of hotels that Hotels by Day works with, segmenting customer base based on hotels they have
Sweet spot are 4 stars, then 3 stars, then 2 stars if they have a record of accomplishment
Customer acquisition is costly
A marketing hack to acquire new customers
Growing organically
Experience is the key in a day stay
Being on Shark Tank
Why Hotels by Day will be the winners by allowing hospitality to join when they are ready
Barely scratched surface of possible demand, giving it time to grow
Part of sharing economy, using idle space and making use of it in a different way
Technology doesn’t allow flexibility and agility to follow trends of modern society in hospitality, don’t have the right tools
And the reinvigoration of the soul by the sea
The main drive of being able to help people

054 – Chris Dankberg of Viasat – Chasing a 700mph Plane with WiFi

August 28, 2018Marc Raco Leave a Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:10 — 56.4MB)

The real story behind WiFi on flights with Viasat…

Chris Dankberg, who runs Partnerships for Viasat (a global communications company that believes everyone and everything in the world can be connected) joins John Matson and Bess Chapman in the MouthMedia Network studios powered by Sennheiser.

In this episode:

How Viasat is about solving really hard problems
Why WiFi is slow on flights
Prior to 5 years ago,ViaSat was about WiFi via satellite for government and private air services
People got used to texting and checking sites that were urgent for destination (weather, hotels, etc.)
The growth of market for Viasat’s tech , high capacity satellites over different frequency bands enabled differently, market wasn’t ready
Why WiFi on planes is so expensive
Allocating capacity on an as-needed basis
Unprecented bandwidth economics
The abiity that you could hand off seamlessly from ground to air started being palatable
The opportunity waited for Viasat to launch a satellite
Demand wasn’t forecasted correctly, so there wasn’t enough supply for demand
Started with business travelers with expense accounts
Battery life on laptops got better, people started using phones
Something not considered was that the whole plane would use wifi
Tech is evolving, organizing data on what is important to customers how they used it
Second and third screen use and solving that need
Pain point – trains – slower with more tunnels, different angle to sky
On the early side of making online video streaming real with companies like Amazon
Disconnecting when traveling because of little kids demanding full attention
Trips that changed Dankberg’s life, created big decisions