Event report: Advantage Focus

The detail is in the data

With Brexit banned from the agenda at the Advantage Focus Partners recent meeting, the emphasis was instead on data sharing, market intelligence and how it can be used to benefit TMCs and their clients. Sasha Wood reports

“The good, the bad and the ugly” of data strategy in the travel industry was the main topic of discussion at the Advantage Focus Partners meeting held at the Park Plaza Riverbank Hotel in London on April 1.

IATA’s Senior Manager for Business Intelligence Projects, Juan Oliver, kicked off with a presentation covering IATA’s Direct Data Solutions (DDS) programme, an aviation data hub currently in development.

He said IATA is in the unique position of managing wide data sets across international borders so the organisation is taking the opportunity to create ‘data lakes’.

Combined with technology and business knowledge, it could be a huge force for good as a source of market intelligence for TMCs and their clients. Discussing the challenge of building data systems, he said “it becomes ugly when we have home rules and regulations across the globe”.

Travelogix CEO Chris Lewis, meanwhile, took to the stage to talk about the IT developer’s new Farecast tool aimed at making it easier for TMCs to analyse airline data. The data collection platform has already been installed at 58 member organisations, where commercial teams can create different data sets to examine market behaviour and make informed decisions.

Demonstrating the product, Lewis said:

“It gives you the organisation and data required to give you the edge over your competitors.” Mark Colley from Sunway Travel, which has been trialling the tool, said it has already been useful to the business.

The GTMC's CEO, Adrian Parkes, followed up with a lively presentation on how TMCs can use data to understand customers and their needs, understand the competition, and think beyond the transaction.

“The data is an enabler. The value of the data is not the data itself but what you do with it,” he said. The overall message from the afternoon was that TMCs need to embrace data or risk being left behind.