Filip Filipov, Vice president of product management - Skyscanner
Skyscanner's Filip Filipov will give the keynote Asia Is Eating The World at Phocuswright Europe.
Ahead of the event, he shares his thoughts on the biggest opportunity in online travel, what advice he'd give to new businesses and what's next for metasearch.
What topic should we be discussing right now, and why?
Customer service and payments. I don’t think we spend enough time thinking about that. For a lot of companies, customer service has historically been a call center.
I think we will see a trend in the future where people want to have somebody available. They wouldn’t want to be left holding the line of a particular provider forever to get their issues resolved. I think a company that cracks customer service will be on the forefront.
Scale or die. The truth is a lot of the successful businesses in travel manage to survive on very thin margins.
Filip Filipov - Skyscanner
A good example - Airbnb - the way they have connected to their users. Not everyone can say they have the number of homes they have. But the experience they have managed to create is exceptional.
Everyone you talk to is like, "Wow, it was amazing experience." A part of that is provided by the host - not necessarily Airbnb - but that’s an example - people are more satisfied throughout their journey because they are able to connect to the host who in a way is the customer service representative on the ground for the guest.
Payments: First, the charges are too high for merchants. Second, our phones are our payment. The credit card information is there only for you to put into your phone, and then you forget about it.
I tested this myself when I went to London. I said I don’t want to get any cash out, I’ll just be traveling with my Apple watch and phone – entirely possible. That will get there.
If you go to China, I don’t think people realize what cash is. This will be the first cashless society. You can pay for anything with WeChat, WePay and Alipay as well. We have to learn from China a little bit and look at how payments are there, and that’s how they need to function in the rest of the world.
What is the most misunderstood element of your role and your company?
My title is vice president of product management. I think at a certain level – I saw this quote – people with enough experience no matter where you start in terms of a discipline, you end up being a salesperson. Whether that’s internal or external. And I think I’m getting to that stage in my career.
Part of our job as product managers is to think about the product experience and how we tie to the travelers, to the partners, and part of that is just making sure that as our organization gets bigger, we get the teams aligned to execute. I think we undervalue the individuals who are trying to bring the teams together and point them in the right direction because that takes a lot of time and effort.
If you could change one thing about how the travel industry functions, what would it be?
Payments. I would change payments. We as an industry need to be a little more standardized. It’s been missing.
Only companies who manage to standardize a lot of fragmented providers have seen incredible success, including ourselves. We connect to 1,000 partners to give you a single set of results on our flight search results. But if you think about booking as well, it’s an incredible job of getting the long tail of hotels, making sure each one has a picture, making sure there is some structure to it.
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I think we’ll benefit as an industry from a little more standardization. At least in terms of how we return the data. That doesn’t mean we have to standardize the product, quite the opposite. But at least we should be able to send that information in a standardized way to all the parties that are doing a lot of the heavy lifting.
What is the biggest opportunity in online travel in 2018?
Quick transactions. People don’t want to be figuring out how to pay and complete a transaction. I’m not sure if we can materialize on it in 2018, but it’s starting to show the signs. Allow people to have choice, but allow them to complete their transactions without the hurdle related to it historically.
If you think about the success of Amazon – it’s not the cheapest anymore for a lot of products. People use it because it’s peace of mind – you know the service you’re going to get, you know you will get it, you know if something is bad you can return it, you know the process and also you don’t worry about the payment. Your entire information in terms of credit card and delivery address is already stored, so you just press a button.
What single piece of advice would you give a new business entering the travel industry?
Scale or die. The truth is a lot of the successful businesses in travel manage to survive on very thin margins. Unless you get to the scale where you can amortize the cost of your people investment across many, many, many users, you might run out of cash.
As our co-founder and CEO [Gareth Williams] says, travel is the field of broken entrepreneurial dreams. There are so many companies in travel and so many have died because they didn’t think correctly how to scale, and they ran out of cash.
How does metasearch evolve from now: bigger volumes, new geographies and industry types, or something else?
Different verticals is always part of that. You have different methods if you will - that give you information about tours and activities, flights, hotels, car rentals. So different verticals is clearly a path that some may decide to take.
If you go to China, I don’t think people realize what cash is.
Filip Filipov - Skyscanner
I think meta needs to evolve from purely being a click-out business. So somebody comes to the site and sees the options available, picks a price, picks a product and then leaves the site. I think over time that’s not a natural user experience.
We are trying to bring that together, so we allow customers to complete the transaction within our environment. Which makes it easier for them and also creates conversions for the partners. I think over time what we’ll see is meta will move from the click-out model to a model that is more relevant for the needs of the user and partners - which is simple, seamless transactions.
Skyscanner was bought by one of the biggest and fastest growing travel brands in the world - how do you retain the existing company culture?
It’s been great. Ctrip’s management has been outstanding. We haven’t really seen a change outside of the fact that now we have a lot more knowledge to tap into in terms of how an agency does it, how they do it at scale.
I’m super happy where we are. We have our independence, and, most importantly, where we don’t have enough knowledge and experience we have very experienced and knowledgeable people to ask who give us the right advice. And we entirely enjoy that relationship.
How do you differentiate, and stay ahead ahead vis-à-vis Google?
Google is top of the funnel. They bought ITA software in 2010, and since then they’ve been developing their business proposition.
Google is a partner. At the same time, it’s a threat to any business. They are in competition with everyone. The way I think about Google is that clearly they will be successful. Such as they might be able to provide unmatched speed. But the depth of their supply is not the same as we can offer at Skyscanner.
Our internationalization and being able to go into different markets and find the appropriate local partners to serve to the users has been something that Google hasn’t been able to replicate, and I don’t think it’s in their priorities to do, to be fair with you.
I fear because of the size of Google and being at the top of the funnel – we may see behaviors that are certainly away from the values that we at Skyscanner have.
For example, we care about the traveler as a partner. And if we manage to get that right, Skyscanner will be successful.
Recently I read … that Google is actually not showing the cheapest hotel rates to some of their users. Which I found a little bit upsetting, because if you have that information, why not.
For us, we’ve always been driven by making the choice available to users. We are not in a position to decide what’s the right thing for them. We can suggest, but ultimately, they should be able to find everything easily. And that example is something that Google as a company needs to decide if that is the right path for them or not.