Innovation is magic made real

The best innovation is led from emotions in response to passion, joy, pain or frustration. The closer something is to your heart, the more motivated you are to improve it or find ways to do it better.

When I was growing up, overseas travel was a relative rarity. Most of us grew up seeing trips abroad through the lens of childhood excitement: heading to the airport, getting on a plane, and touching down in a completely foreign destination full of possibilities just a few hours later. It was a magical experience, one to be treasured and remembered.

A lot has changed since then. The industry has grown to the extent that we can fly more often, and at less cost than ever before. Globalised workplaces employ large numbers of highly mobile employees for whom taking a plane is often as mundane as commuting to work. Travel has become a commodity…and yet, it remains an incredibly emotive experience for even the most frequent business travellers, myself included. The magic may have been dimmed by more utilitarian concerns, but it’s still there.

Rekindling that magic will spark a whole new wave of innovation in business travel. All too often today, we get caught up in corporate travel as a numbers game…and it can be easy to overlook how travellers feel about the whole experience. We get emotional about travel for good reason, let's acknowledge and even embrace that for the industry to go forward. 

Priority call for innovation

That “magic” of travel ultimately, I think, arises from the quality of the passenger experience. Who defines that experience? Employers, airlines, airport operators, travel agents, and even urban planning authorities – they all play a part. So do companies involved in the more intangible aspects of travel, like online booking sites and travel management apps. All these ingredients come together to make the passenger experience pleasurable, fulfilling, and productive – or sometimes, unfortunately, the opposite.

When we talk about passenger experience, we bring these ingredients together. Software providers have the opportunity to communicate with airports about how to give travellers more timely information, or help them make the most of their layovers. Urban planners and booking websites could embrace how to streamline the “last mile” from airport to hotel or homestay – or what services they can work together on to make the journey more seamless. We share the burden of delivering the best passenger experience possible, but we can only do that when we open dialogue with one another.

Dialogue has the potential to be fruitful between those involved in the online and offline aspects of travel. Passengers don’t view their trip as just a digital experience, or a physical one: the two constantly interact with each other to shape how they feel about the overall journey. Travel management apps, try to ensure users not only know the latest information about their trip, like if a flight is delayed; but also allows them to do something about it, like booking a replacement flight through the app. Some times, travel turbulence is part of the experience, but a customer centric approach to communication can reduce the impact. We are only just scratching the surface of what’s possible.

In conversations with business leaders all over Asia, I sometimes ask them to tell me about the first time they went travelling for work. And surprisingly, the tone of conversation quickly shifts, from efficiencies and cost-controls to the excitement, anticipation, and even nervousness that accompanied them on that milestone.

In my experience, acknowledging that travel is an emotive experience, and doing our best to revive that magic for corporate travel…may sound nostalgic, but it’s also the key to the industry’s future.