hi everyone welcome to focusrite's First webinar discussing our annual series of travel technology and Innovation Trend reports I'm Mike Coletta manager of research and Innovation at focusrite and I'm thrilled to be joined today by our team of Veteran travel industry analysts who've authored our Trend reports this year these reports are available in our research for our research clients in our Online Library so if you're one of our subscribers I hope you've had a chance to read them all because they're really super interesting and as relevant as ever this year but this webinar will give everyone a good overview and understanding of each of the trends we've written about whether you've read the reports or not each analyst will have only five minutes to present their Trend and these are complex topics so we won't be able to go into great detail that's what the reports are for but we'll share lots of insights and we'll have about 15 minutes for questions at the end of the session so please enter your questions in the chat or the Q a panel as we go because in the interest of time and keeping the questions focused I'll pick some for the authors to address during that q a time at the end before we get into the trends I just wanted to take a moment to recognize Bob offit who launched our Innovation content practice many years ago and he started these Trend reports many of you may have met him if you've been in the industry and the focusrite ecosystem for a while and you may know that he retired a couple years ago and that's when I took over for him and he taught me a lot about travel distribution in general Airline techs specifically you know including NDC uh and things like Edge Computing and AI so I really want to give credit where credit's due as we continue to build our Innovation content based on what he started so here are Trend authors for this year in addition to myself we have Robert Cole Norm Rose Kathy scatiana Walsh Lori and cilio Adam Glickman and Hollis Thomas's Kathy will be presenting twice as she author two of our reports and I co-authored a report with her that I'll be presenting many of our analysts have been writing for us for a long time decades in some cases but Adam is a first timer so we're glad to have him here with us this year and here are the eight trends for this year and the order in which they'll be presented which is simply the order in which they were published between January and June of this year and I just have to say it's one of the best parts of my job to research and think about and discuss and ultimately choose these Trends every year and to work closely with our authors to flesh out the details and hone in on what's important and I'm really excited about the trends for this year because there's obviously so much happening in the technology realm but whether directly related to technology or not Innovation is just as important as ever if not more important than ever as travel companies attempt to differentiate their product in an increasingly hyper competitive and complex and fast-moving Marketplace and our Trend reports are designed to help you do exactly that understand the most important Trends deeply so you know how to harness or address them in your own businesses so Robert will be kicking things off talking about the future of social media influencers and social commerce and travel which I think is a powerful but still underappreciated area Kathy will be talking about Green travel Innovation certainly one of the most important topics of the day then our resident web 3 evangelist Norm will be talking about how web 3 companies are making significant progress in travel perhaps more than you might think Lorraine will come in to talk about Outsiders entering the OTA Market which is referring to the flurry of non-travel Brands including financial institutions primarily uh entering travel and I co-authored our report on generative AI with Cappy so I'll be presenting that one then Hollis will talk about EV tools and how they're almost ready for prime time Adam will jump in to talk about the real-time revolution in hotel operations and then Kathy will be back to close us out with an update on what's happening with super apps so enough suspense let's get going with Robert on social media influencers and social commerce and travel Robert if you could please turn on your camera on mute and take it away great thanks very much Mike um yeah we only have five minutes so I'll get right right into it um it's it's really interesting the the goal of every travel marketer is to have efficient direct consumer relationships they want to cost effectively expand their brand reach enhance traveler engagement and maximize customer lifetime value very very simple now how can they do that primarily if you look at areas sectors such as Fashion Beauty luxury they're doing very well in that with social commerce and really what social commerce does is it lives at the intersection of media content product and data and it integrates all those factors and that's always been a challenge for the travel industry particularly in Hospitality but really across the sector um definitely in in tourism activities because of the huge amount of fragmentation and the difficulty of getting all those systems to work to work together so um the way they do this is they're engaging um with influencer communities now this isn't just the Mr beasts and the Kendall Jenners and and those folks these are a lot of individuals who've developed their own communities and those individuals follow that influencer they like their style they like their taste and so they listen what they do and they transact and buy so how does it work um it basically the the fundamental um a background of it is the analytics on a platform this is a data driven thing yes there are all sorts of messaging and campaigns and Communications but it gets down to the data and the interesting thing and we'll talk a little bit about a couple of examples are that ties in the consumers same travel frequent traveler ID they don't they don't lose anything like that they get all their points they get all their credit it tracks the influencers or their ID it tracks the brand the brand drives these campaigns um it tracks the campaign through campaign ID it tracks the actual products sold it tracks sales and transaction data and for all the travel folks who go oh it travels complicated you don't have to deal with returns that's really really tricky in fashion um and then the campaign performance clicks landing page and of course influencer influencer earnings so how does this work if you look at a platform like an ltk um which was liked it was short for like to know it soft brand backed um group about a 2.5 billion dollar evaluation they connect all the dots between the brand campaign dealing with the influencers through various collaborations and the consumer so when they run a campaign the brand knows exactly what happened with it originated from that influencer they looked at these products they purchased these products goes all the way through the funnel and then they can compensate the uh can compensate the influencer accordingly and give the the consumer their points it ties it all together very very powerful platform now that's great for the for the influencers they're also brand evangelists or basically regular Travelers and there are groups like Flip 2 that do this through campaigns and they work with a large number of groups primarily in the hospitality and destination space but what they do is they'll run a campaign for example a photo contest well a the brands can capture all of that photo content because the terms and conditions allow them to do so and that becomes the Brand's content to use as they wish but those people running for example in that contest will then share that with others and say Hey I want to win this I can do this all of a sudden it spreads rapidly so they have some interesting case studies where say a grandmother may have greater social reach impact and again conversion by tying in the brand the campaign the channel the influencer in this case just an individual traveler and the bookings that come from it tying it all together so that's really the magic of it and um it's a it's working very very well in Beauty and Fashion um and luxury Brands it should be something in travel and there needs to be some plumbing plumbing work done on the platform level to make it happen I agree thank you Robert please turn off your video and mute and again please note any questions for Robert or any of the analysts in the chat and QA panel and I'll try to post them to them during the Q a Time next up we have Kathy scatina Walsh on green travel Innovation so Kathy please turn on your camera and unmute and Jump Right In okay thanks Mike so in 1970 going back a little ways bear with me in 1970 there were 310 million air passengers by 2019 there were 4.56 billion this broader accessibility of air travel has had enormous benefit I think we can all agree that there's real value in travel but there have also been consequences for the environment tourism is responsible for about eight percent of global greenhouse gases he's all we've also seen individual communities suffer the effects of over tourism there's been a lot of strain unpopular tourism destinations from over consumption of resources to rentals limiting access to affordable housing and other challenges so this is a problem clearly that the travel industry has buckled with for a long time with varying degrees of enthusiasm but there are a few reasons why we felt it deserved a place on our Trends list in 2023 as the industry continues to recover following the pandemic there is momentum to build back better and we're really at a Crossroads the market can either take action to become more sustainable through Innovation or the industry will eventually be forced to do so by crises and regulation and we're already seeing some signs of increasing regulation France has banned some short-haul flights there's debate about what the real impact of that is but uh cities including Barcelona and Venice are imposing entry fees and governments are starting to challenge sustainability claims in an effort to fight against greenwashing governments are also investing more in sustainable tourism projects as they fund recovery and push to meet their own environmental pledges but the pressure is also perhaps for the first time coming from Travelers Travelers are more concerned with their environmental impact and more motivated to take action and this is particularly true for younger Travelers lastly I think as people start to feel the tangible effects of climate change as climate chaos and severe weather events impact individual communities it becomes more than a hypothetical it becomes real and the need for Action just feels more oppressing so we've there's been some progress uh in the last couple of years we've had hundreds of travel companies make public commitments to take action on sustainability the tourism industry has launched several initiatives committing to decarbonization we have the Glasgow declaration um launched at the U.N climate change conference in November of 2021 aligned tourism with the Paris agreement with over 700 business and government signatories committing to have emissions by 2030 and reach net zero emissions before 2050 uh we have to lose declaration signed in February 2022 by the EU member states and 10 other European nations supporting the efforts of EU Aviation to reach Net Zero by 2015. admitting to reduced emissions is a great first step but travel companies need to then establish an action plan for how they're going to meet these specific markets to do that there's a need to accurately measure emissions understand how specific actions will impact the missions track progress and you know this part is important provide transparent reporting um Intrepid Travel is one example of a travel company that has provided pretty detailed reporting on its sustainability program and we look forward to seeing more um information sharing and transparency in the industry uh anybody who wants to learn more about some of these initiatives can check out the global sustainable tourism council's criteria for sustainability and travel and tourism for some more information on objectives it's it's great to see some collaboration so that we have some goal posts that are shared and common uh to the industry so some of within the industry have been working in this issue for decades some are just getting started and there are clearly a lot of challenges just to list a few identifying carbon offset partners that actually have an impact that's been an issue for sustainable aviation fuel there's high cost as well as challenges transporting it sustainably for electric vehicles there's a challenge to increasing public charging stations potentially the need to upgrade electrical grains but possibly the greatest barrier is the need to balance short-term economic benefits with long-term social and environmental goals and you know travel as an industry has been hit with a number of crises over the past decade that demand immediate attention the pandemic being one of them so it's always a challenge to balance the short-term needs with longer term goals but if making travel sustainable was easy we would have done it already but it's clearly time for more aggressive action and innovation in this area and the good news is beyond the moral imperators sustainability is actually good for business a meta-analysis published by the NYU Stern Center for sustainable business showed that sustainability initiatives drive better financial performance due to improved risk management and more Innovation so we look forward to seeing more innovation in green Chapel oh you're muted Mike you were muted oh thanks for mentioning that yeah so thank you Kathy and Norm uh next will give his update on web3 and how it's proving its value and travel so Norm uh feel free to start when you're ready thanks Mike well it's amazing for me to think that it was back at in 2017 when I gave a keynote speech at the focusrite conference around blockchain and at that point uh I was explaining the basics of blockchain I talked about its potential impact in lots of different areas I encourage you if if this is a subject blockchain or web3 as a broader subject that you're not familiar with I have authored I think four or five different pieces over the years and some of my colleagues have often also authored other material and so please take some time to educate yourself because there's an assumption that you understand what this technology is to begin with but the the key thing about what's happened since I I had that initial presentation of focusrite is that we're now in an environment where we actually have real companies doing real work in a variety of areas across all the sub-segments of the travel industry using blockchain technology and it's really quite an exciting change and when you know it was mentioned by I think Robert in his presentation we have to have some Plumbing changes well that's what we're talking about here it doesn't sound sexy but we have some inherent problems around Legacy technology in our industry and that's in all sectors whether it's hospitality whether it's Airline distribution whether it's travel agency either TMC or OTAs each of the segments is challenged by being constrained by old Technologies and we're kind of in this world of multiple apis so everyone has to connect into an API well the network effect of blockchain and the broader subject of web3 which also includes AR and VR and the metaverse is really a trend that's not a travel trend and that's the important thing for me to emphasize here we're talking about a trend that is an I.T Trend that is transformational and so when we look at these different companies in this article you can see how they're applying this new technology to solve real world business problems in travel so the first one on the the first bullet here talks about increasing the efficiency and lowering the cost of in particular payment and settlement because the interesting aspect of blockchain technology is it combines the two together secondly the idea of doing more direct distribution a lot of the themes around uh customer intimacy and customer knowledge and customer data is actually today inhibited by the lack of sharing of data across the value chain and what when you implement a blockchain solution what you're essentially doing is removing some of the barriers so we have direct distribution examples for Airlines for hotels for short-term rentals in the corporate Market in the Leisure Market it's happening throughout the industry and in fact the report that I'm referencing here has 17 different companies who are doing work with web 3 and or blockchain today and I encourage you to to read that and understand what these companies are doing because one of these even the small company may end up being the next big unicorn that's going to change things and travel uh creating uh nfts uh you know the the the the term nfts have kind of gotten a a poor wrap because people think of board apes and and art and rich people collecting digital art do you ever understand it right but really the value of nfts is digitizing the the certificate of ownership and now there is some question I think in the marketplace and was certainly mentioned that the blockchain session I did at the conference last year we had a workshop where there's some question on whether the secondary Market in other words kind of like a StubHub so you have nft tickets for Airlines for hotels whether the hotel industry whether the airline industry will be happy and will try to constrain a secondary Market that could be created by this that's still a question that's a little bit unknown and last you know the emergence of a dedicated travel industry blockchain and this is really interesting because that also takes advantage of something called a Dao which is a decentralized autonomous organization other words rather than having a single a single uh company uh controlling things a dow actually allows the participants on an equal basis to manage the network manage the nodes manage the flow of information so I just want to close by saying that this is not something that again as I emphasized in the beginning that's a travel thing think of the internet has the internet changed your business this is the next phase in the internet and it's happening now and we have companies big tech companies like Microsoft and Accenture and even the world economic Forum which is not a tech company obviously promoting and really pushing you know this idea of decentralized marketplaces so please pay attention to this understand what's happening and you know check out this report because I think you'll find there may be some companies there that could be a future competitor or a current competitor of yours thank you indeed thank you Norm right next up is Lorraine on Outsiders entering the OTA market so Lorraine please turn on your video and unmute thank you New York thanks yeah I want to start this section by asking why do so many companies want to be online travel agencies because it seems like the beginning of online travel a lot of non-travel Brands non-travel companies such as phone companies and retailers and Affinity groups and media companies have wanted to become online travel agencies and you know a lot of that is understood I mean online travel agencies today represent more than a fifth of all travel booked in the world but it's also a very much Consolidated Market with three major players so many non-travel brands have tried but few have succeeded now there are some successes and for example I'm going to mention AARP they use the Expedia platform but they're very an affinity group with a very successful travel play the other one is Costco Travel now Costco has built its own platform it's available to its nearly 120 million members and it sells travel alongside say tires or you know 80 inch televisions and it might be the closest thing that we have in the states to a super app but now we're hearing more and more about financial institutions also getting into the online travel agency game and in order they have to gain from it right they're certainly making lots of money in fees and and do they really you know need to get into the travel business well the trend is really related to the fact that there is little risk in becoming an online travel agency when you use the white label offerings of the major players out there so the three major players offering these white label Solutions Expedia and booking through its rocket travel by Agoda and Hopper with its Hopper cloud and these offerings come in many different shapes and sizes but basically they offer Plug and Play options for anyone who wants to enter the travel industry now some of the more recent Banks to have come online are and I'll just you know mention a few that were in our um you read about them on Focus wire for sure MasterCard recently partnered with Expedia that's with the travel with rewards partnership a city uses bookings rocket travel platform and Capital One is using the hopper cloud and Capital One is also a major investor in Hopper and you know basically most of these players aren't really looking to make a lot of money or at least they shouldn't be now is that what they're seeking is loyalty and retention and providing the value-added service right providing you know something that that is you know can connect them with their Customer because travel it connects all of us so once they kind of take this kind of universal desire to travel right and kind of apply it to their brand and that looks makes their brand look pretty good so you think about it you're already using your credit card in most cases to book your travel and maybe you're even accruing points through some of the supplier branded travel cards so the banks are saying yeah okay so you're using my card to book it why don't you to book the travel especially when you're even on the road and now you're using it for for all everything throughout your journey why don't you also use our platform to book your travel at the very beginning so in the case of Banks and use it and this is very easy because you're on the app already again making that transaction so now why not pull it all together so in the case of banks it's really getting more people to use their car to accrue points now accruing points that I can either use for More Travel maybe for a discount travel maybe I'm redeeming points maybe our redeeming points from another major purchase I made that's not travel related and using that now to purchase travel also in many cases as I mentioned earlier you might these cards also have relationships with so many suppliers hotels and Airlines so in many cases as a consumer you might even be double dipping into all of these various loyalty programs which can make it a bit confusing but not food banks because they're not only getting now your fees right and your interests as well but they're now also getting a commission so a good example here is JPMorgan Chase so JP Morgan is actually building their own through Partnerships and Acquisitions building their own online travel agency platform and the process of building this but they already saying that you know they're going to get again not just you're not just transacting on the card they're getting a 10 Commission and they reported that in 2022 they booked about 8 billion in travel and they expect in 2023 to book another 10 billion so it's more than you know an ancillary business it could be you know decent revenue for Chase travel and it's chasetravel.com now is this trend meaningful really for the big picture right because we're talking long tail right we're talking all these Banks and you know these are Big Fish there are financial institutions but they're in a much bigger pond called travel and they really don't know anything even about travel but um when you think about it what it really does is it it further fragments the market and it can it can have a relationship with shape shift so perhaps one example is I planned on using booking.com but because I'm a MasterCard holder perhaps I find it more convenient now to book my travel the MasterCard app through their travel with Awards program now that booking is going to Expedia so of course yes the big winners are the online travel agencies that are providing these platforms and Expedia most recently said that it's a first quarter B2B revenue from speed to B operations or up 55 Hopper makes more than 40 percent of its revenues from Hopper Cloud so yes this is big business of course it's not all from these non-travel brands most of it's from but at travel agencies that are using these platforms as well as Airlines and hotels tour operators and whatnot but but it is growing business so I just want to ask for first of all for all the OTA wannabes um yes it's a great hook it's a great hook for your for your to build that relationship those Partnerships with your customers and to increase increased spending among your customers but for you as a consumer you know are you going to use your bank's app to book travel so I think that's a question that has not yet been answered so it's certainly wait and see great question thank you Lorraine appreciate it all right and it's my turn as I mentioned I co-authored our report on generative AI with Kathy on how it is transforming the travel cycle and it'll end up being quite a long report where we cover some of the history of chat GPT and other tools and how they work but mainly trying to document use cases as well as think through future and potential uh use cases so current as well as future throughout each stage of the consumer travel life cycle from inspiration to shopping to booking to in destination and sharing as well as promising uses in business operations so starting with inspiration and planning that phase you know we already see significant disruption here because one of the things generative AI tools are already very good at is recommending where to go and what to do just giving you ideas and the more Direction and more details you type into your your travel query in a tool like chat GPT the more it can give you personalized recommendations for destinations you might want to visit detailed itineraries for what to see and do on the ground much the way a travel agent would so it's perhaps a new threat for travel agents here although the other side of it is that these tools can digest agent expertise which can help to further increase the relevance of recommendations with that specialized knowledge which chat GPT doesn't necessarily have and we've already seen a lot of travel companies plug into chat GPT via the API to build their own Solutions leveraging their own data and then I wanted to share one of the more speculative use cases I thought would be interesting to mention which is the creation of customized previews of places and experiences to help Travelers get a better sense of what it could be like under certain conditions so as an example if you're looking at a river raft tour you might be able to get a good feel for what it would be like on a rainy day versus a sunny day or in Rough Waters versus calm Waters and then next in the shopping and booking phase we thought through the implications of these extremely capable natural language interfaces in contrast to the typical set of input boxes and drop downs were all accustomed to using to input our dates departure City destination and preferences and to me it's and it's an open question it's still such early days it's an open question on which interface what interface will be better and I think we'll probably start to see the merging of aspects of bold text only and input uh drop down type of input and one of the big questions we pose is who will have better command of these tools and how their use might tip the balance of bookings between suppliers and intermediaries generally speaking historically intermediaries have had an edge in technology adoption and we also thought about how the shopping process could be further personalized when paired with voluntarily shared personal data such as in the near future case of incorporating self-sovereign identity Solutions which promise to allow travelers to easily share their personal data with travel providers like their home address preferences loyalty programs and travel credentials which could result in Faster more relevant personalization than we've ever seen and on the B2B side of things we point out some low hanging fruit for businesses such as generating and optimizing websites sales and marketing copy certainly everyone should be thinking about doing this if not doing it already because chat GPT in particular is already very good at this and can save a lot of hours and we also thought through what generative AI might mean for advertising and discoverability for travel companies in terms of capabilities and limitations of the chat versus search environment which are increasingly merging and the implications of a shift in where people start their travel searches and and how more curated results might be surfaced as well as monetized and one of the more unique scenarios we point out is comparing with NDC technology which could allow for natural language queries to efficiently tease out and process things like custom offers and frequent flyer benefits during the airfare shopping process and we conclude the report with some thoughts on some further thoughts on how interfaces might evolve we believe they need to become more visual because travel is very Visual and this is already happening with the recent enabling of multimodal capabilities which can input and output images and video and we know to watch the evolution of autonomous agents which can execute much of the work involved in collecting information and even booking travel and making changes or some really cutting edge stuff happening there and lastly we Ponder the position that Google's in as it's so influential and often controversial in travel and has so many capabilities especially in Ai and so much data that can be used for personalization but also a lot to lose in getting this wrong and a tough balance to strike given its regulatory scrutiny and the fact that chat GPT with Microsoft's backing is such a formidable foe and I just want to mention it's such a fast-moving topic um we give you great coverage of it our Focus wire team does great coverage of it on on focuswire.com so I absolutely recommend going there for um for the latest developments and to follow what's happening with this topic so that's up for me that's it for me next up is Hollis on EV tolls so Hollis please unmute turn on your video let's see you all right take it away hey everybody so I'm going to start by explaining what EV tolls is and then we can talk about how and when they'll be used in travel in vitol is basically the acronym for electric vertical takeoff and Landing aircraft and that's pretty much the George Jetson if you remember that cartoon flying around in his family's mobile uh taxi car evito is our next Generation air transportation for the first and last mile which means interest City travel and nearby City to City Travel and Transport our analysis analysis focused on Urban Air Mobility which the acronym for is UAM and it means consumer passenger travel evitos can hold about four to six people per vehicle and so they're kind of like thought of as a flying taxi the value proposition of a vetoles is that they um purport to be less carbon emissions than other first and last mile Vehicles like helicopters short haul planes shuttle buses taxis and ride hailing services uh future ebitolls may or may not be autonomous um kind of like a big drone that carries people and these beetles will likely land and take off from verticals which are like heliports on top of tall buildings or an obstacle-free locations early on these ebitos will run on fixed schedules kind of like buses do or you'll have to book a reservation later on they'll be available in a ride hailing on demand capacity and as far as the cost roughly they've been estimated to be about 2.25 cents to 11 per passenger mile recently Airlines have gotten in on the ebitol action so why would Airlines want to get into the taxi business first of all ebitos have been projected to be potentially very lucrative the UAM consumer projection Market is about 32 billion by 2035 and when the market Peaks it could be as large as 500 billion right now there are over 300 EV toll developers in this arms race companies you might hear about frequently in the news these days would be Joby Eve vertical Arrow space ehang lilium Archer City bus and again there's dozens of others since 2021 major airlines including American Virgin Atlantic Delta and United have announced deals to either invest in or make purchase commitments for Ev tolls and the reasons are both claimed and then inferred for example the airlines have claimed to want to be able to access critical information and development technology by buying into or investing in EV tolls they want to improve the passenger experience for example shuttling passengers to and from airports particularly ones that suffer from congestion clogging and a horrible to and from experience there's an obvious advantage to help the airline industry meet its 2050 Net Zero carbon emission standards which Kathy referred to earlier and those standards need to be met starting in 2028 as far as some regulated mandated reductions and um one could say that evitos allow Airlines to appear Innovative conscientious and relevant to Consumers as well as the market there are some timeline hurdles in question evitos are going to be a reality soon but how well would they be adopted what are their challenges and what are the outstanding questions first of all there's varying tidelines for certifications for example if vetoes have been approved for passenger flight in China already but in Europe and U.S where the airspace is more regulated it's likely to be closer to 2025 and even being certified for airspace doesn't mean that everything else will be ready will Pilots be trained and certified will there be vertaports built will there be charging stations will there be consumer Demand yet and speaking of consumer demand there are widespread consumer adoption opticals there's a lot of obstacles there are a lot of perceptions about safety are these vehicles safe are the pilots qualified what about crashes we don't want to end up with a Titanic explosion in the middle of the sea kind of thing and it's Acceptance in the middle of the air what about noise will it be very noisy in Flight what about the on ground and ambient noise for the surrounding areas affected by EBT travel privacy think about drones will people be flying past other homes and see into people's windows and how about the Aesthetics what are the impacts to our skies what are the impacts to Flying wildlife and are there really beneficial impacts for example are road traffic reductions going to occur or they're just going to be some total more vehicles but now they're in the air and on the ground I don't see the automobile manufacturers pulling back from marketing and production of their cars for example and our AV Tools truly sustainable for example do lithium-reliant electric batteries really present a sustainable option our sustainable Aviation fuels an alternative that's going to be more widely adopted and lastly you have the consolidation issue how many of those 300 companies are really going to make it to the end of all of this and how many will be thriving those are the questions we ask about EV tolls thank you so much thank you Alice next up is Adam um on real-time revolution in hotel operations and Adam wrote this report with this colleague Dimitri coltonov so Adam jump in hey Mike and hello everybody thanks for having me today and excited to share some insights around kind of what's happening in hotel operations and how technology is playing a major role what we're going to talk about today is kind of highlighted in the report and it really starts with this core Principle as we look to the future of how is a lot of data translated into actionable insights for operators and I think the key Trend that we unpack and we talk a lot about is everyone sees data through the presentation so far you can kind of get a sense especially as we're addressing how AI is used the breadth of information that exists the value of that information is figuring out how to turn it into to actionable tidbits usable bytes that different team members in an organization can utilize and what we mean by that and what we unpack in the report is saying what are you doing to think about what a manager in a hotel may need to know if they say our housekeeping manager or a front office manager that is different than a GM which is different than an Abrupt property leader with a portfolio of 6 or 10 or 20 hotels and so the first thing that we're beginning to see more of our companies just like actable looking forward to saying how do we translate that data into actionable insights that different stakeholders can use and it gets to them in a in a means that matters most to them so instead of just saying here are a bunch of dashboards or New Technology Solutions going to give you an email report the long-term value is getting organizations that can bring together lots of disparate pieces of information from different Hardware providers software providers and aggregate them and normalize data so the consumer of that data has a much more clear and simple to follow roadmap of the actions that they take off of that data um kind of building on that a little bit and something that will kind of go into a bit more uh in the or that you'll see more in the report is thinking about these actionable insights for different operators and hotels so one of the trends that we saw happen through the pandemic was The Exodus of many team members as well as mid-level managers in our industry and many of those folks went to other Industries as those roles and I think of roles like director levels and large hotels agms and select service and mid-size hotels so those roles were replaced they were replaced with a more junior staff or a less experienced Hospitality team members than those that left and what that means is those new Liberty members have less historic knowledge and best practices inherit in their own knowledge base in their head from kind of real life application at work and so it becomes more important that there are platforms that can provide step-by-step instructions or effectively the guide or the directions that a team member would need to succeed in their role the days of having like a year management development program and many organizations are no longer in place and Technology as we kind of think about this trend is helping ramp up that onboarding period especially again for that kind of mid-level AGM manager and development the second thing that kind of really will align it is we look to the future of using uh operations platforms is how do you match up performance and productivity of your team members and really optimize labor so an interesting data point that we uncovered uh within our database is looking at the historic wage rate growth of a housekeeper as an example and how has that housekeeping role in the U.S actually surpassed the wage rate of a guest service or front desk agent and so earlier this year for the first time ever the average U.S housekeeper wage exceeded the average U.S guest service agent or front desk agent wage housekeeping is a highly in demand role we can't sell as hoteliers we can't sell dirty rooms and getting rooms cleaned is key to being able to drive Revenue into a business or into your business so things like saying recognizing housekeeping wages are up how do we optimize the hours of Labor it's going to take take a warehouse keeper to clean a room are we cleaning every room so stay over cleans for two or three night stays we saw some huge shift changes in the amount of stayover claims that happen but those stayover cleans impact how hard it is to get a room cleaned when a guest checks out because it hasn't now been cleaned for two or three days and that impacts those minutes per occupied room and so the trend that we're unpacking is how is automation how are tools going to help Elevate and enhance the role of team members in hotels like housekeepers in this instance or guest service agents so can we make it easier for a housekeeper to punch a room have all the steps that they have to go through in their checklist for cleaning a room laid out being able to make it much more seamless to flag up a maintenance issue that may result in a room being out of order those little actions when aggregated can shave minutes off cleaning time better scheduling the order of the rooms a housekeeper operates in at about a floor so it's less manual and more automated reducing those minutes per occupied room for clean has a huge impact when we think about the total costs for cost per occupied room and then the total cost of housekeeping knowing that wages have gone up or wages and will continue to rise so optimizing labor and increasing efficiency is the second Trend and then the third thing that kind of we really unpack in the report is the idea of making communication really work for your future organization and your future team so are there instances where the guests themselves and I think this will build a bit on what Michael talked about about the use of AI and use of tools like chat gbt um but are there ways that we can make the human interaction that a guest is having with a front desk agent really focused on what matters to that guest and less about the transaction less about having to spend time identifying my folio or swiping my credit card or having to call and wait and ask like can I get pillows delivered to my room which is much more of a transaction so that the team member at the front desk or the team member on the phone can focus on you know specifically that local experience or that in hotel service experience that could theoretically be memorable and so the trend what we're seeing is adding automation adding tools that streamline the actions that team members have to take with guests that can make a pillow example a guest request both text that text gets pushed out to the team members that have to deliver it the team members that deliver it then have kind of an automation confirmation that the delivery occurred moving that through in an automated way so that teams can focus on kind of the the service experience experiences then the very last thing that kind of will share and kind of before I jump into some questions that we pose or we ask in this report it are are really related to making sure that additional manual tasks that happen on the team member side for how team members are working and communicating with their organization are streamlines and what we mean by that is think about our future teams and hotels how are gen Z team members communicating a question that I often ask is how many hotels today still have a printed two-week schedule in their back office who lives like that anymore you know everybody's working and living on their phone on tick tock on social platforms so how come our team members can't swap chefs or our team members can't see their schedule communicate with their manager know when they are being called off or called on for a shift know when there is kind of a urgent need for a set of guests in a hotel make that engagement platform work in the terms of the team member not in the terms of how historically hotels have operated and so that Trend that we're really seeing move is getting uh it to be much more focused on team member engagement on the team members terms so thanks again oh okay yes I want to make sure we stay on time Adam wasn't sure if you had another point that was it that was it I'm going to pass it back to you on the report we kind of asked many questions all related to optimizing operations for teams and tour guests great yes all right sorry about that and thank you much appreciated and uh for our last Trend please welcome back Kathy to talk about super app's Secret Sauce thanks Kathy thank you so I don't know about you but I am in a constant bottle to free up storage on my phone I would say the the main problem is probably that I take too many videos of my pets sorry kids but I'm constantly offloading and redownloading apps on my phone in order to free up storage and this pretty much sums up how the movable ecosystem has evolved in the West for better or worse there's an app for that when people are shopping for travel we know that they visit multiple brands in the course of trip planning and every brand wants you of course to download their app this can become frustrating for the traveler um and it's going to be a bigger issue as mobile becomes the primary Shopping Channel with you know entering a different login entering your payment information doubling storage space Etc and of course if your customer is hopping around it leaves them less time to spend on your app so travel companies are looking for ways to keep Travelers within their own app or ecosystem and more and more the last couple years we've been hearing uh references to Super apps and wanting to be the next super app or the super app for this vertical or that vertical this concept as many of you probably originated in Asia and the app we hear cited most often is WeChat but there are others grab in Singapore paytm in India cacao and South Korea ah most of these started as a single service like messaging her payments and then evolved to add a lot of other Digital Services so in contrast to the Western Paradigm super op users can access most of what they need on a daily basis in one place things like travel messaging gaming digital payment e-commerce delivery ride hailing Etc this exact model despite you know lots of talk of super apps for many reasons is not not likely in the West for one thing mobile Gatekeepers like Apple and Google um themselves arguably you know offering tons of services and well suited to offer something like a super app although there are barriers um they've done their best to prevent the app within an app model from Gaining traction they don't want apps within an apps they want to you know people to pay for those uh the to be in the app stores there are also greater Anti-Trust suffers privacy and data sharing concerns um and different consumer behaviors but there's more as people are are doing more things on mobile there's a need for a more streamlined experience um and some of these challenges can be addressed by things like blockchain and self-sovereign identity but in the meantime we're seeing a lot of Western companies pulling from the super app Playbook to try to create what are basically pseudo super apps so I mean a lot could be said about any of these individual companies but I'll just touch on a few of the elements um that are worth discussing so disgusting the first is daily usage right super apps thrive on being integrated into the daily routines of users and the goal is to be open daily or maybe multiple times per day most people only plan a few trips a year or so adding services that keep users coming back is a big deal uh Uber is is looking at doing this it's pushing to expand Beyond Ryan healing to food delivery um and trying out other things uh particularly in the UK testing out uh you know they've got activities nightlife now air travel through a partnership with hopper um and you know eventually other products uh one way some apps have solved this is through social networking WeChat of course began as a messaging app and the advantage to social networks have is that they already have a large active user base so famously Elon Musk has cited uh plans to leverage Twitter to create X the everything ah meta has made efforts to Branch out to things like shopping dating uh but like a lot of the big players in the west things end up ultimately being rather silage so these big players like Google Apple meta a lot of what they offer is more apps to download another key ingredient is finntec payments are can be a pain point for you know the Western Babel ecosystem and there are fundamental function of super Ops creating a seamless way for users to make purchases across services so coming from the payments Arena we have minimum PayPal revolut in Black in travel we've seen Hopper building on its fintech unit uh and finally there's gamification uh this may be my favorite but this is all about driving usage and then rewarding users we're engaging in desired behavior and anyone who has seen the way uh kids use online games these days I mean it's really like taking on a part-time job their programs so that player talk to return like every two hours to I don't know water their eggs or something said that it eventually hatches and they get a reward it might be for kids like a new monster to battle but for adults the reward could be a discount a free ancillary or a loyalty reward it's basically like fostering engagement with the promise and you know making it fun with the promise of something of value there's a ton that to be said about companies like Google and apple um or in any of these companies really um and their prospects for leveraging themselves into some version of a super app but um the Articles super app Secret Sauce that was more deeply into these uh companies and some of the other features and how they're trying to position themselves check it out thank you Kathy um I just wanted to highlight our events that are coming up I hope to see you at one of them we have round two of our Global startup pitch competition on August 24th the first round was in May so the companies that uh that advanced from that round will be presenting on August 24th and you can register for free to watch that live and then on September 5th we're kicking off the next cohort of our immersive travel Tech executive Fellowship which is a phenomenal program if you're looking to rapidly increase your industry knowledge or Network and on November 13th we'll be revealing our annual list of hop 25 travel startups and November 13th also kicks off our annual Global conference in Florida and a quick reminder that the early bird registration rate ends on July 31st if you are interested in registering for the conference so thank you to everyone for attending thank you for the analysts for doing a great job presenting the trends we all appreciate it and as I said hope to see you at one of our upcoming events soon thanks